Slightly Single

Oh, hell. Will.

“I have a boyfriend,” I tell Buckley, plunking my beer bottle on the round paper coaster with a thud.

“You do? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t think to. It didn’t occur to me that you thought we were on a date.”

A date.

It’s just so incredible how the whole situation could’ve blown right by me. I guess I was so distracted by what’s going on with Will that I wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on with Buckley. Rather, to what Buckley thought was going on.

I’ve cheated on Will. Completely by accident, but still, it’s cheating. And right here in his own neighborhood, in a bar that we sometimes come to together. What if someone had seen me here with Buckley? Kissing Buckley?

Again, I scan the bar to make sure nobody’s here besides the bartender, who isn’t paying the least bit of attention to us. The place is definitely deserted.

So I wasn’t caught cheating.

Will never has to know.

Still, I’m mortified.

I look at Buckley. He doesn’t look mortified. He looks amused. And maybe a little disappointed.

“So you have a boyfriend?” he says. “For how long?”

For a second, I don’t get the question. For a second, I think that what he’s asking me is how much longer do I expect to have a boyfriend. I bristle, thinking he just assumes Will and I are going to break up after being separated this summer.

Then I remember that he doesn’t know about that. His true meaning sinks in, and I inform him, “I’ve been with Will for three years.”

“That long? So it’s serious, then.”

Naturally, I’m all, “Yeah. Absolutely. Very serious.”

Well, it is.

“You know what?” I hop off my stool. “I just remembered something I have to do.”

“Really?”

No. But I’m too humiliated to stay here with him any longer. Besides, that kiss really threw me.

Basically, what it did was turn me on, and I can’t go around being turned on by other men. I’m supposed to be with Will, and only Will.

I pull on my raincoat and fumble in my pocket for money. I throw a twenty on the bar.

“You’re really leaving? Just like that?”

“I just…I have to run. I can’t believe I forgot all about this thing….”

The thing being Will.

“Well, at least give me your number. We can still get together. I can always use another female pal.” He grabs a napkin and takes a pen out of his pocket.

Yes, he has a pen in his pocket. Dammit. How convenient for him.

“What’s the number?” he asks.

I rattle it off.

“Got it,” he says, scribbling it on the napkin.

No, he doesn’t. I just gave him my grandparents’ number with a Manhattan area code.

“Take this back,” he says, shoving the twenty at me. “This is on me. You’re not even going to get to eat any of the skins.”

“That’s okay. I’m not that hungry after all.”

He’s still holding the twenty in his outstretched hand, and I’m looking down at it like it’s some kind of bug.

“Take it,” he says.

“No, that’s okay. I can’t let you pay.”

“Why not? Really, I won’t think it’s a date if I pay,” he says with a grin.

That does it. I’m getting out of here.

He shoves the twenty into my pocket and I take off for the door, rushing out into the rain with my slicker open and my hood down.

I’m drenched before I get to the corner.

My first instinct is to rush right over to Will’s.

If I were in my right mind, I would stop, reconsider and go with my second instinct, which is to slink home on the subway, take a hot shower and crawl into bed—rather, futon.

Instead, I go with my first instinct.

In the lobby of Will’s building, I buzz his apartment.

Nerissa’s hollow voice comes over the intercom.

“It’s me,” I say. “Tracey.”

“Hi, Tracey,” says Miss Brit in her polished accent. “Will’s not here.”

He’s not?

But he’s supposed to be here. Packing.

Well, maybe she’s lying.

No, that doesn’t make sense.

Maybe he had to run out for more strapping tape or a new marker.

“Do you know where he is?” I ask her.

“No, I don’t. I just got back from rehearsal. I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

No offer to let me come up and wait for him, I notice. Well, the apartment is pretty minuscule, and she probably doesn’t feel like hanging out with me until Will comes back from wherever he is.

But still, I have a right to be there if I feel like waiting for him. More right than she does, since Will’s name is on the lease, I think irrationally.

“See you later, Tracey,” she says breezily. Her later comes out “light-ah,” heavy on the “t.” Tracey is “trice-ee.”

“Yeah. Cheerio.”

I stalk back out into the pouring rain.

Six

“You coming to lunch, Tracey?” Brenda asks in her thick Jersey accent, poking her long, curly, helmet-sprayed hair over the top of my cubicle.

“If you guys can wait two seconds for me to fax something to the client for Jake,” I tell her, not looking up from the fax cover sheet I’m filling out. “Otherwise go ahead without me and I’ll order take-out.”

“We’ll wait for you, hon,” Yvonne’s smoker’s rasp announces from the other side of my cube, just before I hear a telltale aerosol spurt as she sprays Binaca. She and my grandmother are the only two people I’ve ever seen use the stuff.

Then again, they’re probably about the same age, although Yvonne looks a lot younger. She’s tall and super-skinny with a raspberry-colored bouffant and matching lipstick, which she re-applies religiously after every post-cigarette Binaca burst. Yvonne’s claim to fame, other than being secretary to the big cheese, our Group Director Adrian Smedly, is that she was once a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall. She likes to tell stories about the old days, dropping names of celebrities I’ve mostly never heard of—people who were famous back in the fifties and sixties.

She’s what my father would call a real character, and she would take that as a compliment.

What should have been a quick fax job turns into a dragged-out ordeal. All I have to do is send Jake’s memo over to the client, McMurray-White, the famous packaged goods company that makes Blossom deodorant and Abate laxatives, among other indispensable products. But for some reason, the fax machine keeps beeping an irritating error code.

I hate office equipment. Whenever I go near the fax machine, the copier, or the laser printer, the damn things apparently sense my uneasiness and jam.

This is not a good day. Earlier, I scalded my hand using the coffeemaker in the kitchenette adjacent to the secretaries’ bay. And just now, on my way out of the ladies’ room, I slipped on a patch of wet tile and went down hard on my butt. You’d think the extra padding there would have cushioned my fall, but now it’s killing me.

Jake comes up behind me as I try to force-feed the memo into the slot for the fiftieth time.

“Having trouble, Tracey?”

I turn around to see him wearing a smirk. By now I know that it’s nothing personal. That’s Jake’s usual expression, unless the client is around. Really. No matter what the circumstances, Jake finds something to smirk about. If I tell him his wife is on the phone, he smirks. If I tell him the NBC rep canceled tomorrow’s presentation, he smirks. If I tell him a document is being messengered over from his broker, he smirks.

Let’s face it: he’s the kind of guy I’d consider an asshole if he weren’t my boss. He leers at women behind their backs, laughs whenever somebody does something clumsy and—I’m starting to think—cheats on his wife, Laurie. That really gets me. They’ve been married a little over a year, and I’ve never actually met her, but she’s really sweet whenever I talk to her on the phone. Sometimes when she calls, Jake makes a face, rolls his eyes, and tells me to say he’s in a meeting. I always feel guilty when I do that, because Laurie is so disappointed, and it’s like she doesn’t even suspect I’m lying.

Meanwhile, lately, no matter how busy he is, he always takes calls from a woman named Monique. Supposedly she’s a friend of his. If you ask me, married men shouldn’t have friends named Monique. And something tells me Laurie doesn’t know Monique exists.

“Can you see me when you’re done with that?” Jake says, as the fax machine starts beeping an error code again and latches on to the first sheet of the memo in a death grip.

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