Carrie Pilby (13 page)

I wonder if this is how Johnny Carson used to do it.

 

I double back and head toward the Mexican restaurant to meet Matt. I'm still a few minutes early. Killing time is hard, unless you're avoiding work, in which case you can think of an infinite number of things you need to do. But maybe he'll be early, too. I see that in front of the restaurant there are two women and a guy waiting for people. The guy has a soft black briefcase slung around his shoulder. He's fairly short, but handsome. He's got straight, dark hair. He looks my way, and I smile uncertainly, and he smiles back. He walks toward me, asking, “Heather?”

I almost want to say,
You're no one special. You don't look like any stud. Why don't you just stick with your girlfriend?
But despite myself, I do think he's good-looking. And pleasant, right away. It's not fair.

“I'm Matt,” he says, and he shakes my hand. His eyes crinkle a bit. “You hungry?”

“Yes.”

We head inside. “Where do you work?” he asks, looking me over. A scraggly-haired waiter who doesn't look a bit Mexican leads us to a table.

We sit down and look at each other. He
is
good-looking. But not in an intimidating kind of way.

“I'm a legal proofreader,” I tell him.

“Did you go to law school?”

“No.” I'm pleased he thinks I could be that old. “I proofread lawyers' documents, but all I have to know is English, not legal terms.”

“I'm sure you're good at it. You look like you're good with words.” I accept the compliment silently. Our waiter comes, and Matt asks if I want a drink, and I say I'll stick with water.

“Not to be a spoilsport,” I say.

“No,” Matt says. “Actually, I don't drink. I'm one of the few.”

“Really?”

Matt shrugs. “Never saw the point of it.”

“Wow. There's so much pressure to do it in college.”

“I know,” he says. “I've been called things over it. I have better things to do than get sloshed.”

It's funny that some people really just do not care about peer pressure. They're the ones who've been well-adjusted since age five. I'm sure not one of them.

The waiter sets down our waters and disappears.

“So you work in legal proofreading,” he says. “Where did you go to college?”

“Near Boston,” I say.

“Boston…College?”

“Harvard.”

“Oh.” Matt nods. “I went to Cornell.”

Figures he'd be smart. “Good school,” I say.

“Yeah, as opposed to Harvard,” Matt laughs. “I'm surprised someone from Harvard would read the
Beacon
personals.”

“Why? Because all of us should be out trying to solve Fermat's Theorem?”

“Fermat's was solved in 1993,” he says.

I laugh. “Usually, I can get away with stuff like that.”

“Me, too,” Matt says. “Do you have trouble meeting smart people?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Definitely, at times.”

“What about—” I stop myself.

“My fiancée? Shauna's smart.”

I can't believe he says her name when he's on a date with someone else.

“She's smart,” he says again. “She went to SUNY Binghamton and all. But I don't feel challenged usually. I'm smarter than she is. Most of my friends are her friends, too. I need more…outside interests.”

“So you said.”

Matt laughs and looks embarrassed. An odd emotion for someone who placed an ad saying he wants to fool around.

I think about how each Sunday, he probably wakes up next to Shauna, pulls on a plaid shirt, dons a baseball cap and heads out with her to the local diner for brunch. As they sit across from each other next to the window, the sunlight spills over their table and they kid around and rearrange the containers of syrup. Over eggs, juice and toast, they talk about the future, and later they hop into Matt's car and drive to the country to see her parents.

“How did you meet her, if she went to Binghamton?”

“High school,” Matt says.

“Wow,” I say. “You didn't meet anyone else in college?”

“Cornell can be alienating. Shauna visited me there a lot. It really helped. It can be a pretty cold place.”

“I see.”

“You ever been up there?” he asks me.

“No. I've heard the campus is beautiful.”

“It is,” Matt says. “Maybe we'll go up someday.”

The waiter appears, startling me. “You ready?”

Matt half nods, then stops himself. “You?” he asks me.

“I'll have…two tacos.”

“Beef or chicken?”

“Beef.”

“I'll have quesadillas con chor-i-zo,” Matt says, pronouncing it slowly.

“Coming up.”

Matt turns to me. “Shauna hates Mexican. She won't ever touch it.”

“Why?”

“Just doesn't like it. Therefore, I
never
get to eat it. And it's like my favorite food.”

“Does she drink?”

“Nah. Well, actually, sometimes the both of us have a little wine on holidays. At Thanksgiving.”

“The pressure to drink in society is amazing,” I say. “Even from families.”

“It really is,” Matt says. “And people don't acknowledge it as a form of pressure. The odd thing is, they act like
you're
the one out of place because you're not doing what they want you to do, even though you haven't put any pressure on
them.
”

“Yes!” I say. “That's true!” I admire him for noticing that.

“It's funny, though,” Matt says, flicking a piece of wrapping from the straw off the table, “everyone is addicted to something. Some people have happy families, and they're addicted to their spouses and children.”

“Makes sense. What are
you
addicted to?”

Matt smiles. “I guess, challenge.”

“That's not bad.”

“It can be good,” he says. He keeps looking at me. I suppose this is a good sign.

Now a group of noisy teenagers, high-school aged, sits down at the next table. Matt shoots me a look.

“We should have gotten a booth,” he says.

“That's what I was thinking.”

“Was it just me,” Matt says, “or did you find nearly everyone in high school stultifying?”

“Yes,” I say. “In fact, they were so stultifying that if you'd used the word ‘stultifying' in front of them, they would have shouted, ‘SAT word!'”

Matt laughs. “‘SAT word!' I remember that. The teachers were lousy, too. Well, some were okay. Two of mine are coming to my wedding.”

I ignore this disturbingly wonderful detail. “I'll bet your teachers loved you.”

Matt looks sheepish. “Well,” he says. “They didn't hate me.”

“Were you first in the class?”

Matt nods. “How about you?”

“First.”

One of the teenagers at the other table calls the other one a “biter,” whatever that is, and I shoot Matt a confused look.

“Got
me,
” Matt says. “We said ‘dork.'”

“We had a kid whose last
name
was Dork. It didn't hurt him, though, because he was good-looking. He was lucky.”

“He was also lucky his first name wasn't Dick or something,” Matt says.

“It was.”

“Right.”

“Really.”

Matt smiles. “I'm going to have to go to your apartment and check your yearbook to make sure.”

Why is this so easy with someone who is taken? Is that the only time I'll have an advantage—when I'm number two?

“In high school,” Matt says, “did you have to pick a quote to go under your yearbook picture?”

“Oh, you mean, favorite quotes? No. We didn't have that.”

“We did. My classmates all put in song excerpts. I was the only one who quoted a philosopher. The girl on the left of me quoted from ‘Don't Worry Be Happy,'and the girl on the right quoted ‘Paradise By the Dashboard Light.'”

We plow through our food. It's alternately salty and spicy, but I barely taste it. I'm too nervous and excited.

Suddenly Matt looks at me and asks, “What's your favorite word?”

What a great question. No one's ever asked me that.

“It's…well, it's not a word, but a phrase,” I say. “‘Check-kiting.'”

“Check-kiting?” His eyes narrow, but I can tell he's intrigued.

“Yeah. It sounds like what it is. It's a terrific metaphor.”

He says, “I should know, but what is it, exactly?”

“Oh. It's like, when you pay one check with another, and then you pay
that
check with another, and you pay
that
check with another, and you keep the money moving and never really have any. The checks are soaring but they're really just worthless pieces of paper, like flying a kite. It's cool.”

“That
is
cool,” Matt says.

“What's
your
favorite word?” I ask him.

“Doozy,” he says. “That's a fun word.”

“Where does it come from?”

He thinks. “I don't know. I should look it up.”

You can bet
I
will.

He orders us a dessert to share—ice cream with hot fudge and
fried banana slices. Matt says he can't ever get dessert when he's with Shauna because she's afraid of getting fat. “She's nutty like that,” he says.

“Apparently not nutty enough.”

“Nutty enough for what?”

“For…you to leave her.”

He looks at me. “There are always going to be things about another person that bother you. You have to decide which are unimportant enough to overlook, and which aren't.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, it's probably good that she tries to stay thin. I mean, I'm not gonna complain.”

I don't know if he's joking or not.

“Don't you worry that maybe you'll meet someone you love more?” I ask. “You
are
still young.”

“I have met people here and there,” Matt says. “I've loved none of them more. And it's not as simple as that. Maybe I do bitch and moan, but don't get me wrong, I do love Shauna. She's sweet. She's amazing in the way she cares about people. If a homeless guy came up to us on the street and asked us for money, she would either give it to him or explain for ten minutes why she couldn't.”

Remaining on our plate is one small hill of vanilla ice cream with fudge strands fading into it, and neither of us wants to be the one to eat the last bite.

“I know you didn't want to hear any of that,” Matt says. “Good things about Shauna.”

“No,” I say. “I just want to understand it. So I don't do anything wrong someday, if I meet someone. I want to know how you know she's the one you're going to marry. Especially if you're still capable of having feelings for other people.”

“Well, I know whenever I picture myself twenty years from now, I picture
us,
” he says.

“What if you meet someone you fall madly, madly in love with next year?” I ask. “After you get married?”

“What if I don't?” he says. “She's not going to wait for me forever, and there are things I want. I could wait until I'm forty and lose her and never have a family. I've always wanted that. And I've always thought she and I would have one together. But that doesn't mean I won't have needs.”

Needs. I have them, too. So what if Matt and I do get together from time to time? But if I like him, I'm going to want to talk to him, tell him my problems and hear his. And he's already telling them to Miss Sensitive every day. So he won't need anyone else for that. All he'll need someone else for is, well, “needs.”

Maybe I can convince him that he'd be better off with me. I can talk to homeless people, right? I can go outside and find one right now.

“What does she do?” I ask, taking half of the remaining scoop.

“Advertising, graphic design,” Matt says. “She worked for an ad agency for five years, and now she's going freelance. I'm really proud of her. She's finding it tough, though. It's hard to get that first client. Her parents are helping her out with loans.”

“But you'll take care of her.”

He grins. “Yup.”

After Matt pays and I pay the tip, he says, “So, can we get together again sometime? I know it's a weird situation, but I would like to get to know you better, if you're okay with the parameters. I mean, I'd really like to.”

“Sure,” I say. He gives me his business card. I know that, with his last name, I can track him and his girlfriend down.

But I don't know if I want to rat him out right away. Is it possible that someone who cheats on his fiancée might not be a horrible person? What if it's true that what she doesn't know won't hurt her? Maybe it's not bad if I keep this from her. I cer
tainly would not be the last person Matt is going to do this with. Maybe only the first in a long line. If he's going to do this now, he surely will ten years from now. He'll move through different relationships in his life, just like any guy who dates. And even if it's hard, he'll always find women to do it. They'll be like me—knowing that someone as smart and attentive as Matt can be hard to find, accepting that of course he met some girl early on and was not going to hold out for us, so we can only be second in his life.

If I
did
tell Shauna about what he's doing, the two of them would probably fight and then patch things up. I wonder if that would include a promise by him never to do that again. I don't know that Matt could make such a promise. Maybe he'd be honest. Maybe she'd call it off. Still, either way, he'd never talk to me again.

Why does that bother me? Okay, I admit that I liked being with him tonight. He's bright and friendly, and I didn't feel nervous or awkward with him. Plus, he seemed to like me. The practice can't hurt. I'm not ready to lose contact with him yet.