Diary of a Working Girl (23 page)

This is not because my mother has done something so logical as to meet Liam and discern that he is a good person with high morals, who treats me kindly. And it is also not because she possesses psychic qualities that enable her to see that Liam does in fact have the best intentions and will one day ask for my hand in marriage.

I wish I could say it was that deep, or even respectable, for that matter. But it’s not.

The reason my mother has founded the Liam fan club is that she has concluded, solely through my descriptions of what he looks like and sounds like (the G-rated version, of course), that he is not familiar with off-brand groceries. Which is to say, that he is rich.

And to her, this is as glaringly obvious a sign of the perfect man as a slot machine ringing and buzzing with coins dropping down all over the place is a hint that you’ve won the jackpot. If she were to design a slot machine, rather than fruits or palm trees, she’d probably use little depictions of men driving Mercedes, men steering yachts, men holding out Amex Black Cards, and men escorting women into Tiffany’s.

If a guy I am dating happens to, say, live in my building (which is a “sad place for a man to live, okay for
you
of course”), have a roommate, or work for a not-for-profit agency, in any of the arts, or do anything with his hands, and it doesn’t work out, she’ll say, “I knew it wasn’t meant to be. He just wasn’t right for you.” Just like that—whether he had been given a commendation by the mayor for running into a burning building to save small children in a fire 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:05 AM Page 179

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or invented a cure for cancer or spent his spare time teaching Braille to the blind.

Don’t get the wrong idea about my mother. She is not walking around posh hotels with a metal detector, stopping at the bejeweled man fetching the loudest beep. She herself is no Joan Collins, riding around in limousines all day, fully coiffed and sipping sherry with one pinky out. In fact, quite the opposite; this is a woman who demands ice cubes for her glass of “mer-lotttt.”

But the way she explains it is that being as I “will never make any
real
money of my own with my little writing thingies,” she is constantly worrying about my welfare—picturing me in tattered rags, begging for change for subway fare.

“It makes me sick darling, just sick as a dog.”

Apparently, this sort of worry is not so all-consuming that it gets in the way of her daily trips to the diner or her weekly hair appointments, or her monthlong vacations to the Caribbean—

during which her deep concern doesn’t require anything as excessive as a telephone call. But it does make for a comforting welcome home.

“Oh, honey, let me see how skinny you’ve gotten from making no money and driving your mother into an early grave with worry, just so you can keep up with your writing thingies.”

“Just forget about this silly little assignment and make a go of it with Liam,” she is saying into the phone. “Billy, come down and get your dinner! Your father is going deaf, I swear. And did I tell you about the party your Aunt Anne is having next week for cousin Kelly’s college graduation? She’s making some crazy crunchy gra-nola kind of food. I told her to just order from Cluck Cluck Chicken. You know how they have those great mashed potatoes and the cucumber salad? And the barbecue sauce is divine. And I offered to make my pasta salad. You know the one with the Italian 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:05 AM Page 180

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dressing and the broccoli that I made for your birthday last year?

Did I ever give you that recipe before? You just have to get that multicolored, twisty pasta—I think it’s spinach and carrot or something like that; otherwise they just dye it to have the different colors, but either way—and then you boil it up, al dente, and then you drain it, defrost the broccoli, and just toss it all together with the whole bottle of dressing; you should use the Wishbone, it’s really tangy. And that’s it. So, do you think you can bring Liam to the party, then? Everyone’s dying to meet him.”

Liam to the party. Liam to the party? Perhaps if I want him to go running and screaming all the way back to London by foot, I would ask him to go to the party. (I table this for a backup plan should I decide I really need to rid myself of him for this assignment.) My family, thinking he is royalty, and doubtless asking all sorts of questions about Prince William and parties at Buckingham Palace—too embarrassing to even think about.

Liam is not the sort of guy that you imagine playing with your dog. He’s the sort of man you imagine doing it doggie-style with.

And the latter is more the man for me anyway. I never once added a checklist box that reads, “Compliments my mother on her twisty pasta salad.” That is too commonplace to even consider. We don’t even walk on earth, much less on the streets of Long Island.

And besides, I remember Liam saying, “Family parties are not my thing. Why people feel the need to waste a perfectly good Sunday acting like they’re interested in hearing who’s got high blood pressure, who’s headed for a divorce, and who’s filing for bank-ruptcy because they blew too much on trying to outdo their suburban neighbors on the twisty shrubbery competition is beyond me.”

I’d had the family-pleasing boyfriend before; I’m falling asleep just thinking about it.

Still, I can’t help allowing my mind to explore how wonderful it 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:05 AM Page 181

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would be to go home for once without anyone inquiring why it is that I am still single and whether I would like to meet their coworker’s son Jason. And if so, would I let a little thing like ulcer-ated adult acne get in the way of my feelings for a very nice person?

But that would be nothing compared with the fact that Sunday evenings have now transformed from the loneliest time in the world to a cuddle and giggle fest of movie rentals and microwave popcorn, during which, if my phone rings, I can take the role of oblivious coupled friend to my single girlfriends calling to chat because they can’t bear the loneliness of a Sunday evening—rather than me being the one who is nasty to my coupled friend when she tells me, through a mouth full of microwave popcorn, that she can’t talk because she is in the middle of cuddling and giggling and watching a rented movie.

Come to think of it though,
tomorrow
is Sunday. And I still have not heard from Liam since our last night together. Surely he can’t be so busy that he cannot spend one moment with me the entire weekend.

When I hang up with my mother the walls of my apartment seem like the most depressing apartment walls that have ever been.

Just moments earlier, they were blossoming with memories of Liam, lovely Liam. Now, they are just reminders of his absence.

That is ridiculous.

I am not the sort of insecure girl who panics at a few days of silence from a gorgeous, successful British man, just because he could have any girl in the world he wants.

Still, I do feel deserted.

I can honestly feel a cactus growing right inside my chest. It is prickly and painful and it is the most horrible sensation I have ever known.

Disturbingly, though, there is something rather sensationally
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matic
about the pain and the insecurity and the blankness of my walls. This sort of pain is anything but ordinary. It is epic.

Isn’t this the way I’d always wanted to feel? So in love that it hurts? So tormented by emotion that I would dash my life to shreds?

I am so lucky! All those years of Joanne telling me I had no idea what love was all about—I held strong, and I have finally been re-warded.

I could just sit here all night and stare at the blankness that is my painful separation from Liam. And so I stare. And I stare.

Hours go by.

I check the time. When it says three and three-quarter minutes have passed, I check another clock. And one more.

Well, time is nothing in the face of true love. And so, if I’ve spent minutes that feel like hours staring at the blankness that is my painful separation from Liam, that’s plenty dramatic. Right? Right.

Besides, I’m getting to that state when you’ve stared too hard and no matter where you look, there are little dots of color where there shouldn’t be. Like in the middle of my literally blank desk wall (which is blank because it is waiting to be hung with magazine articles from
Vogue
and
Elle
, penned by
moi
, but which now I’m thinking would look so much better with a picture of Liam and I), and right in the middle of my otherwise blank computer screen. Which just goes to show why I definitely need to go out right now.

So I strain my memory to think of someone to go out with (who is not a guy I should be dating but I’m not interested in, or a guy who I am in love with even though I shouldn’t be and who isn’t around anyway), and I remember that wonderful girl from the temp agency with the great shoes—Samantha.

It turns out Samantha is actually in public relations (hence the 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:05 AM Page 183

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nice shoes), and left her job at one of those humongous firms because she “felt the company was just taking money from clients for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and that every single project I worked on was pointless and of really no benefit to said clients at all.” And to make matters worse, she was placed on horrible accounts like medications for venereal diseases and panty liners for thong underwear and so she had lots of difficulties feeling important in the world in general and most distinctly, when it came to talking about her job to anyone at all.

When she reveals this information to me, we both suddenly realize that we had once spoken about two years ago, when she was calling around to see if writers were doing any pieces on either venereal diseases or panty liners that you can wear with thongs, as she was assigned to organize a very unnecessary trip to the venereal disease medication plant and the panty liner factory all at once, since, as luck would have it, they were both located in Iowa.

I distinctly remember a girl calling me about this and breaking down in tears, and when I gingerly bring this memory up, she recalls the conversation, too, and we both can’t believe that she stuck it out for so long afterwards.

So now she has decided to do something more important with her life and felt that advertising might be a step in the right direction. Ms. Banker had pointed her to a boutique advertising agency, but when she went on the interview, she discovered the agency handles panty liners and so she just ran out of the office right at that moment without explaining a thing to anyone.

“I described my whole situation in detail to Ms. Banker, and so I couldn’t believe she sent me to that agency knowing full well which accounts they handle!” she says over our second glass of sangria.

“I believe it,” I say, with the sort of camaraderie you can only 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:05 AM Page 184

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have when you share negative feelings about the same person. And then I go on to divulge my theory about how Ms. Banker likes to break people down before building them up again.

“Oh my God. You are so right!” she says, waving her head back and forth, as if I’ve just figured out the murderer in a whodunit.

I am a genius—when it comes to solving other people’s problems, that is. “And therefore, what you have to do is go back to her now, and she will surely do the right thing for you, because that is the way she plays the game,” I inform her, in my most I-am-a-clairvoyant-wonder-of-the-world voice.

“That makes total, fucked-up, no-sense sense. That is
exactly
what I’ll do.”

“Cheers to that,” I raise my glass to a girl who can curse freely with someone she has just met.

After a third glass of sangria, I get that wonderful warm feeling that comes when you make a friend that you have a hunch you will wind up loving forever and will get to be bridesmaids for when each gets married. We have already covered jobs; apart-ments (she has two roommates—one cute British guy and one annoyingly tall and thin British girlfriend of his); places of birth—she is from California (although doesn’t have that stupid happy-all-the-time L.A. attitude that New Yorkers normally associate with people from that region); and now we are at the all-crucial-but-you-never-want-to-bring-it-up-when-you’re-dating-someone-as-to-risk-seeming-like-a-show-off-topic—men.

She brings it up, for our fifth cheers of the night, the one that marks our entrance into word-slurring and dangerous clumsiness:

“To hoefully, one day fining a man worth a hill of beas in this city full of scenesters and cute but nah sessy men.”

I really couldn’t have said it better myself. Except, of course, now I have Liam, who is neither, and is absolutely perfect, despite 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:05 AM Page 185

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the fact that I haven’t seen him since Tuesday and still don’t know his last name and must break up with him immediately.

“Hey, I have a crazy idea,” I offer.

“Wha’s that?” she asks, wiping a dribble of sangria from her chin with her palm. We’ve had too much to drink and probably couldn’t even speak clearly enough to order another drink, but of course won’t realize this until tomorrow, when we start questioning how bad of an impression we’ve made and send cute e-mails to cover up the embarrassment of anything we may have done.

“I met this guy at my offsse who’s asssolutely gorgeous, knows a thing or two abou copy machines, and’s a nice ass. I mean a grade-A, genui nice ass.”

“So whasss wrong with ’im?” she wants to know, rightfully so.

What is wrong with Seth? The only thing I can think of is that he’s not Liam.

“Obviously, something is wrong with him if you don wanhim.”

“Well.” And I stop myself, because I really don’t want to tell her that I’m seeing someone, as I feel we’ve been bonding so much that I can’t really build this huge wall between us right now—you know, then I will be a “them” and she, an “us.” But I can’t very well say I’ve already been there and tossed him, so I have to fess up.