Heart of the City (11 page)

She slowed down a little, and said, “So if you can’t play violin, what can you play?”

“Guitar,” he said. “I was into rock and jazz guitar. I went to Berklee. The one in Boston. Have you heard of it?”

“I actually just dated a drummer who went there.”

“Really? What’s his name? Maybe I know him. I mean, I didn’t know everyone, but I jammed with lots of guys.”

She said his name, but the man, with a slight look of deflation, shook his head and said he didn’t know him.

They had reached the end of the block and were under the light of a street lamp. “Well, this is my subway,” Sofia said, nodding at the steps.

A look wrinkled the man’s face that was the perfect opposite of the smile a few minutes earlier. If that first expression was the Greek theater mask for Elation, Sofia thought, the one now was Woe. “This is your subway?” he asked, as if the idea were beyond comprehension. “But, I mean, like, where do you live?”

“The Village.” The light was bright, and she could see now that he was well dressed—was that a suede jacket?—and a little handsome. “What about you?”

“Gosh, just a couple blocks from here.”

“People live here?”

“Why wouldn’t they? I walk everywhere. It’s one reason I’m surprised when people say they take subways.”

Sofia let out a snort, then raised a hand to her lips to hide her smile. “Look, my orchestra is playing Saturday at Jazz at Lincoln Center. If you’re interested in checking us out, come.”

“Well, what are you doing now?”

“I was going to go home.”

“Do you want to get a cup of coffee first? I’d love to keep talking, if you would.”

“Coffee?” she said, eyeing him dubiously. “It’s almost 11 p.m.”

“There’s like five Starbucks right around here. They’re really nice.”

This guy is pathetic, Sofia thought. There was an earnest quality that was so un-New York. The guys she’d met through online dating services were razor-edged with irony, attitude, intellectual one-upmanship. Many were aloof, hard to decipher, except maybe for when it came to expressing what they wanted in bed. Where the hell is this guy from? Maybe it was just that in strange lands—if you could call Midtown that—there roamed strange people.

He didn’t offer much in the way of mystery. But if nothing else, he seemed safe. She was on safari, right? “Sure,” she said, looking off into space and shrugging. “But I have to be up for work tomorrow, so I can’t stay long.”

ALL FIVE coffee places he had in mind were closed, which she found amusing. “I thought this was your neighborhood,” she said.

“It is. I swear.”

“Well, we could just go to a bar.”

They wandered for a while before finding a place with neon beer logos in the window, an Irish pub on Fifty-fifth Street called Cassidy’s. There were maybe six other people inside. They found a seat in the back.

“How old do you think I am?” he asked, apropos of nothing.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking at his fresh-scrubbed face. “Twenty-five?”

“I turn thirty next month,” he said. “But a lot of people think I’m older, because I have less hair than a lot of guys my age.”

She hadn’t noticed—his hair seemed fine. “Okay, so, like, you’re
completely
not from the city.”

He told her he grew up in a strict Irish Catholic household in Rochester—his dad was a family doctor, his mother a school-teacher. He was the third of four kids and, by the conservative standards of their family, the rebel. He started listening to classic rock on the radio at age five and by high school had started several bands.

“Oh, yeah,” Sofia said, listlessly. “What were they called?”

“Earth Chick.”

“Shut up.”

“Yeah. And another one was Rare Picasso.”

“That’s pretty terrible.”

“Oh, come on. It was definitely cool at the time.”

“If you say so,” she said, taking a sip of white wine. “So what happened after Berklee?”

He told her he’d moved to New York City in hopes of working his way into managing bands for major record labels. But it didn’t work out. He got mired in low-level jobs in other departments and was turned off by the drug use endemic in the industry.

When he told her he’d reinvented himself as a successful software engineer, learning how to program from books, she sat up in her chair.

“Okay,” she said, slamming her palm against the table. “The Internet. It makes no sense. Explain.”

She got a rise out of pressing people’s buttons. Asking a knucklehead question was a good way of putting people on the defensive, of poking a hole through their pretensions as they bumbled their way through an answer. She wanted to see how he’d take it.

“That’s a really good question,” he said. “It can be confusing. I totally didn’t get it at first. But let me draw you something.”

He reached across the table for a stack of bar napkins and pulled a pen from his coat pocket. And like a teacher with his favorite pupil, he sketched a diagram with hubs and spokes and a few helpful notations in the margins. After this five-minute tutorial, she actually felt she’d learned something. But all she said was, “Hmmm.”

He folded the napkin and handed it to her. “You can keep it.”

“Tee hee,” she said, covering her mouth and faking a coy laugh.

“So what do you do?” he asked.

“I chop mice’s heads off in a lab.” She told him about her detour after Harvard, about how she was helping to run experiments that her bosses hoped would help cure multiple sclerosis. When he asked about her name, she told him she was descended from Russian Jews.

“It’s definitely a cool name,” he said.

It was a quarter to midnight when Matt glanced at his watch and suddenly looked at her panicked. “Oh, my Gosh, I almost forgot.”

“What?”

“It’s 11:45. My sister. I have fifteen minutes to wish her a happy birthday.” And so he excused himself to leave a message on his sister’s voicemail. “The siblings, we always call,” he said after hanging up. “Close shave tonight.”

Is this guy for real? Sofia thought.

Some three hours had passed when Sofia started yawning. “I gotta get home,” she said. She obliged his request for her phone number but refused when he dug into his wallet for cab fare. She was a few steps down the subway stairs when she turned around.
He was still there, at the top of the steps, with that goofy smile. “I’d ask for your phone number, too,” she said, “but, like, I already forgot your name, so I wouldn’t even know where to put it in my cellphone.”

A perverse thrill seized her as his expression somersaulted, just as it had earlier in the evening, from a caricature of sublime joy to one of abject misery.

MATT TOSSED in bed that night. He thought he’d met the perfect girl: smart, pretty, quirky. On that empty street, it was almost like some supernatural force had handed her to him. Then, just like that, she turns on him. She bumps into me, she talks to me for three hours, and then, as a goodbye, she announces that she’s already spaced my name. He replayed the evening a dozen times in his head. Everything had been going so well. When did he lose her? How?

Not long ago, he’d called a phone number a girl had given him only to discover it a fake. “Murray’s Garage,” some gruff-sounding guy answered, as Matt’s heart sank. I won’t make that mistake again, he told himself now. My ego can’t stand any more dings. It was safest just to leave the thing alone, to sock away the memory as a trophy from the night he persuaded a random girl on the street to spend three hours with him at a bar. If he messed with it, if he called her, the memory was liable to turn into something else: a scar.

ON THE subway ride home, Sofia felt good about her rough handling of that guy. Pete. Dave. Matt. Whatever his name was.

Earlier in the year, she’d met a man through an Internet service. They had been dating seriously for four months—she thought they might have a future. Then she found out he had several other girlfriends, ones he’d never mentioned. To convince
herself that she was desirable, that next time would be different, she plunged headlong that summer into online dating. A startling number of men were transparently after quick hookups. There wasn’t so much as the pretext of romance. Her dates would rush her through dinner—“We’ll split it,” they’d say when the bill came, as if in some praiseworthy nod to feminism. Then it was off to a bar, where they drank so much that Sofia found herself kissing the boy—and going home with him—far faster than she’d intended.

The next morning, she’d wake up feeling cheaply used and in need of a hot shower. A few of the men she’d actually liked. She thought they were funny, intelligent, ambitious. Some she even saw again. But then, when their calls stopped, she began to hate herself.

Instead of withdrawing from the matchmaking services or more carefully screening suitors, at first she sought only more. She was like a compulsive gambler convinced that the jackpot was just one more roulette spin away. But after a long summer of betrayals, bunco, and bullshit, she felt something inside her go cold. “The nice person is always the one who gets hurt,” she told herself. The next time, it wouldn’t be her. The next time she met a guy she liked, she would comport herself like a zookeeper in a tiger’s cage at mealtime—with quick reflexes and a high-voltage electric prod.

Meeting a nice guy on the street in front of Carnegie Hall was a charming story. She saw that. But if there was one thing she’d learned over the summer, it was to be careful around charmers.

AT WORK the next day, Matt told the whole story to Scott, who worked in the next cubicle.

“Dude,” Scott said, “you’re a total stud.”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to call her.”

Scott jerked his head from side to side in disbelief, looking like a dog drying himself after a swim. “What are you talking about?”

“I told you, she kind of dissed me at the end. The stuff she said, it was so random.”

“Dude, the entire night was random. What did you expect? Chicks pull bullshit of that order all the time. She’s testing you. Wants to know how big of a man you are.”