Who You Know (2 page)

AVERY

I
believe there is a certain order to the universe, an organized plan; I believe that from the chaos comes meaning. Just as the unruly spattering of notes of music on a page are transformed into a symphony when you interpret it and put it all together, there is a method behind the madness.

What the method to this current madness was, however, unclear. My horoscope this morning had provided no warning this was coming.

It was all the fault of my caffeine addiction. If it weren't for my dependence on coffee, I would have been safe in my office right now and not standing here waiting for the coffee to brew and listening to Jim from the sales department tell me he was bringing over a bride from the Philippines. What was the proper response to such a statement? What was I supposed to say?

What I did say was “Well, that's great, Jim.” I nodded and smiled and willed the coffee to brew faster while he went on about how beautiful she was and how they had such similar philosophies about life.

I watched the coffee dripping slowly, a caffeine udder. I couldn't exactly leave now with an empty cup. Why did I ever get hooked on coffee in the first place?

I never would have poisoned my body with such a toxin like caffeine in my dancing days, but now that I worked in an office, coffee gave me that artificial jolt of energy I needed to make it through the day.

I looked at Jim, letting his figure blur. His aura was orangy red, a good sign. Maybe he really was happy. Maybe this would all work out after all.

When the coffee was ready at last, I poured myself a cup, told Jim I needed to get back to work, and bolted back to my office, feeling better than usual about being single.

If I let myself think about this poor woman who was going to marry Jim, I'd start crying. I couldn't let myself think about it; I couldn't let the toxic thoughts consume me.
Everything happens for a reason, everything happens for a reason
, I reminded myself.

Even though the whole thing was sad, I couldn't wait to tell Jen, my officemate, about Jim's overseas bridal shipment.

It was always rewarding to share gossip with Jen. She'd been cracking me up since our cubicle days when she'd hurl paper airplanes made out of pictures downloaded from bestiality Web sites across the walls of our cubicles. Several times a day she would wedge her way into my cube and whisper scandalous tidbits about coworkers: “Avery, I have such dirt to dish, you would not
believe.”

Jen and I had recently been promoted from peons to low-level grunts at McKenna Marketing, and our promotions had been marked with a move from cubicles to a cramped, windowless, bathroom stall-size office we shared, making it easier than ever to share the latest rumors.

At 8:30, only half an hour late—unusually early for her—Jen came rushing into our office holding a liter of bottled water in one hand and her briefcase in the other. Jen always made a big show of taking work home with her. She didn't do any work while at work, so I found her pretense of being a slave to her job hilarious.

“My day is ruined before it's even begun,” she announced, dumping her briefcase onto her desk. She collapsed into her chair and swiveled theatrically around to face me. “I got trapped into having a conversation with Lydia in the hallway. I saw her coming, but I had no place to hide, and I had to hold an entire
conversation
with her.”

“How is our fertile co-worker?”

“Glowing
as usual. You'll be happy to know that the little fetus is an absolute
Rockette.
Lydia's
latest
craving is for apple butter on melba toast. And the nursery is almost done, and it is
just perfect,
absolutely just
so adorable.”

Lydia was a nice woman, but she was hopelessly superficial. Talking to her was like holding a conversation with a Pop Tart—there just wasn't a lot of substance.

Jen turned on her computer. She stared at the screen contemptuously as the computer booted up. “It's only eight-thirty in the morning, and I'm bored and ready to go home. Please tell me you have gossip. How is Art?”

“I haven't had a chance to check my e-mail yet 'cuz, Jen, I've got some serious heavy-duty dirt. I'm serious, you are never going to believe this: Jim is bringing over a mail-order bride from the Philippines.”

She arched her eyebrows and looked at me. “No way! That is
hilarious!”
she roared. Her hysterical laughter was contagious, and I couldn't help but laugh right along with her.

Jen did nothing halfway. When she laughed, she really laughed—a knee-slapping, head-thrown-back kind of laugh. She made this
aah-aah-aah
noise that was really more of an absence of sound—all you could hear was a few choking breaths between convulsions.

“I can't believe he'd tell you about it,” Jen said when her laughter had abated enough for her to speak. She dabbed at the tears in the corner of her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “You'd think he could at least lie and pretend he met her while traveling. We'd still know she was marrying him for his money, but at least it wouldn't be quite so obviously gross.”

“You know something? I read this article that said the whole mail-order thing became popular in the seventies, which just happened to be when American women discovered a little thing called feminism.”

“Here's to being single,” Jen said, raising her bottle of water. I clinked my coffee cup against it. “Speaking of, check your e-mail already.”

I logged on to my Yahoo! Personals account. For a moment, I felt guilty about laughing about Jim when I, too, had turned to such unromantic means of finding a date. The moment passed.

At least people using the personals knew what they wanted and weren't selling themselves to escape their grim socioeconomic plight. I didn't really think I'd find my soul mate online, but it had been nearly two years since the divorce, and I hadn't gone on a single date that entire time. I'd been wary about getting into another relationship. I knew from experience that marriage was highly overrated, but Jen had more or less forced me to try to get back into the drama of dating. She created an account on the Yahoo! Personals and would respond to guys' ads, describing what
I
looked like. When they wrote back detailing the salacious acts they wanted to perform on me in unlikely locations, she'd forward their responses to me, cackling with laughter.

She thought her ruse was hysterically funny, but I thought it was sort of mean, or at least in bad taste, and definitely creepy.

To get her off my back, I made up my own account and even browsed through the ads every now and then. I hadn't really planned on responding to one, but eventually I found the ritual of reading them somehow therapeutic—it was nice to have constant confirmation there were other single people out there. At work, absolutely everyone except Jen was married. Or, like Jim, getting married, no matter what it took. We single people were a freakish minority.

Of course, the ads could be depressing, too. Most were not particularly appealing, and not everyone posting an ad was single. Many of them were along the lines of “I want to have sex with someone who is not my wife. If you respond, you could be that person!” Others said things like, “ISO a woman who enjoys golden showers. Must enjoy being urinated on.” A little repelling, no doubt, but, on the other hand, this was not the kind of information you want to find out about a guy late in the game, like right before you're going to get peed on, for example. This is the kind of stuff you want to know
right up front
.

This being Colorado, a lot of the ads were guys in search of women who liked mountain biking and skiing and skydiving. I liked working out, but I wanted to be firmly on the ground when I did it. Before marrying Gideon, I'd dated my share of sports fiends, and I'd learned my lesson. I didn't want to spend my vacations rock climbing and mountain biking and camping with only a stream to bathe in, if, that is, I could fight my way through a fog of mosquitoes and gnats. With the personals, I could make my desires known right away.

Over the weeks, a few ads had mildly interested me, but only one made me feel like maybe there was hope of meeting a decent guy after all.

He went by the moniker “ArtLover,” and his profile said that he was a 6-foot, 170-pound nonsmoker with hazel eyes and brown hair. His ad read:

He seemed modest yet not lacking in self-esteem, funny but not trying too hard. And there was something so endearing about a guy with dogs. He would be caring yet firm, playful yet responsible. (All those walks on freezing cold winter nights!)

We'd been e-mailing each other for a couple weeks, and I was falling for him a little more each day. I was surprised how much I'd gotten to know about him in our daily e-mails. He'd told me all about his travels and his parents and his brothers and his friends. He told me about his frustrations at work and what he enjoyed about his job. He was a good writer, and he always managed to put a smile on my face. He hadn't demanded my measurements and my picture as some other guys insisted on, which suggested a certain depth of character. Plus, we had a lot in common. Though I'd grown up in Colorado and he'd grown up on the East Coast, I'd gone to New York for high school and college, so we could talk (write) at length about the cultural differences between the turbocharged East Coast and laid-back Colorado.

I loved that he was an artist, but not a starving one. I imagined him immortalizing me in one of his paintings. It would happen like this: He would ask me to pose for him. I would feign resistance at first, then relent. In his dusty, ramshackle studio above his garage, I would lie naked on a velvet couch, my legs extending across the couch, my blond wavy hair fanning out in soft wisps around my head. He would position my body just so, his fingers lightly grazing my skin . . .

My e-mail let me know, with an excited exclamation point, that I had new mail.

I loved that he thought I would discover all the details about him someday, that our relationship would last long enough to extract every last one of his secrets. I smiled and hit REPLY.