Mr. Unavailable #120: I'd like to Introduce You to the Curb

See Sweet Virginia, The First Date, Just Desserts, To Nobu or Not to Nobu, The Duel, The 36-Hour Freakout, Him, Himself and He, Million-Dollar Me and One Block from Heartbreak for the background on this one.

Prologue: When I was in high school, I was so shy that I found it almost impossible to talk to boys. I’d develop deep crushes based on exchanges in front of the soda machine that went something like this:

Me: I’d silently put in my change and punch the big orange soda button.
Boy: “Oh, you got Orange Crush? That’s the best.”
Me: More silence. I'd try to eek out a smile but, really, it looked like I was about to cry.
Boy/New Crush: “Later.”

I dreamed of getting stuck in the school’s elevator with my crushes. Then they’d finally see how smart and funny I was. Today, I have the equivalent of my high school elevator. I go on dates. On these dates, guys see how funny and smart I am. Some of the ones I pick even stick around for a while. The only thing is, sooner or later, they always seem to want to get out of the proverbial elevator. Or, really, I discover they were never really in the elevator. My mistake has always been to be sad about it, but maybe, really, they were doing me a favor.

Encounter #9: Immediately after he left, I texted Zoe and left a message for Nora telling them what had happened. And then I stayed up, cursing him, cursing myself and writing. At about 4 a.m., Zoe phoned post-Van Dam and offered her support. “Fuck him,” she said. Nora texted around the same time and told me she was in Boston but would call me in the morning. I went to bed at 5 a.m., I woke up at 10 a.m. and talked to Zoe and Nora on the phone. Both of them agreed that #120 can’t have his cake and eat it, too. I wasn’t, after all, asking him to marry me.

“Who’s to say that in three weeks, when you ask him again if he won’t sleep with anyone else, what’s to stop him from saying, ‘Well, it’s going along fine as it is and you’ve been fine with it so far, so can’t we just continue to see what happens?’” Nora said over the phone from Boston. “At that point, you’ll be even more involved and you’ll only be more hurt. He can’t have it both ways,” she said. The friend she was staying with in Boston, whom she’d accidentally hooked up with the night before, agreed. “He has to make a decision,” I heard him say in the background.

Because Zoe and I had learned not to trust the ideas that came from putting the two of our heads together, when she came back from her 24-hour Van Dam outing, she said she’d even asked all the gay boys. “No way,’” she said they said. “That’s not on.’”

On a sidenote: A few days earlier, Zoe and I had had something of a light-bulb moment. “Why don’t we look for a place together?” We both wanted space and light and a two-bedroom offered more of that for more reasonable money. Plus, we were getting along living together in my tiny studio and, to be perfectly selfish, I was kind of enjoying having a live-in therapist and makeup artist.

So, later that gray day, we were coming back from looking at apartments, Zoe was hungover from her night at Van Dam, which included a full-on snog with her new gay boyfriend, and I was dragging.

“Look, just say to him…’” she started to say.

But I already knew what I was going to say to #120.

I got ready and walked into my usual Monday night gathering intentionally late, to make an impression, knowing that #120 would already be there. I decided that I had to tell him I wanted to talk to him before everyone went over to the restaurant.

He was looking at his phone when I walked in and seemed unable to look at me. Finally, he looked up and we waved to each other.

At the end, he came up and gave me a hug. He said he had to help clean up.

I waited for him, getting into a conversation with someone else, but when I turned around, his coat was gone. He hadn’t said anything about leaving. I was on a mission now. I’d talk to him one way or another. I’d take the subway up to his apartment if I had to, but I was going to get this over with.

When I got to the restaurant, he was there. A seat was open across from him. I sat down. I was as cool as anything. I didn’t want him to know that anything was wrong because I didn’t want him to get spooked and leave. But even if he had started to get up prematurely, I was prepared to say in front of everyone: “Can I talk to you outside a minute?”

There were about eight of us around the table. And, finally, I saw him in new light. He didn’t ask anything about anyone else and when people asked him about him and why he was going to pastry school, he said, “It’s the only thing I don’t know how to do.” I could see it now. Finally. He was overcompensating.

“I need to get cigarettes,” he said.

“Guess who has some.”

“Duane Reade?”

“No,” I said, and pointed to myself.

When the bill came, we all paid and it worked out that he and I were the first outside on the sidewalk. “Which way are you going?” I said. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

We started walking. I gave him a cigarette, took one myself and he lit both.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” he asked.

“Well, I was thinking about our little talk yesterday.”

“Were you thinking about it all day?”

“No. I went to the gym, looked at apartments…” Like I said, I was cool.

“So, what were you thinking?” He sounded nervous.

“I totally get it. New York is like a playground for young, single men, so, yeah, I totally get it….. But if that’s what you want to do, then I can’t see you anymore."

A pause.

“Well, this is an unexpected development,” he said.

“I can’t see you while there’s a possibility you’re sleeping with other women. That’s just how I am.”

“Can we still get cake?” It sounded like some sweetly pathetic kind of last-ditch effort.

“Sure.”

“But probably not as often,” he said.

“No, not as often,” I said.

I changed the subject, asking him about which job he would take and, again, we talked all about him. To be fair, he was probably too stunned to think of any topics of conversation that revolved around me.

I walked him to the subway.

“This is my stop,” he said.

We shared a small kiss on the lips and a hug. He kissed my cheek and held me for an extra moment.

“Good-night,” I said as he headed for the subway stairs.

He said nothing.

Walking home, I was positively striding down the sidewalk, smiling and holding my head up high.

“Hey, beautiful,” a man I passed on Bleecker Street said. I didn’t even care that he may have been homeless, because, for once, I believed what he said.