Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Read online

  Hillary wasn’t on the scene to negatively critique my wardrobe selections.

  Going through the scant nonwork options in my clothing collection, I’d found a basic black dress shoved in the back. And when I say basic, I do mean basic. Made of some kind of stretchy nonwrinkle fabric, it could probably be rolled into a ball for months if need be without sustaining any damage, but it was so nondescript that it would never look like much unless someone like Jackie O or Princess Di wore it, and then only because they contained that inner magic while the dress clearly did not. On my feet, I slipped on the blue-green Momo Flats, figuring the color would make a strong statement and at least my toes would feel magical. Then I borrowed a lipstick Hillary never used anymore, a red that looked too bright on me, but what the hell. I wasn’t trying to impress so much at this point as I was trying to look not awful.

  Hillary also wasn’t on the scene to question whether or not I might be making a mistake.

  “I don’t think he’s really right for you,” she might have said, echoing something Conchita or Rivera, I forget which, had said at one point.

  “There’s something a little bit…dangerous about him,” she might have added, echoing thoughts I’d been regularly having myself. Whatever Billy Charisma might have wanted from me, the mere virtue of the fact that he was totally comfortable in a tux put him out of any league I’d ever been in.

  Come to think of it, I didn’t even have a league.

  But still, I was going over to his place for a simple dinner he was going to prepare for me. How much danger could I possibly be in?

  Hillary wasn’t on the scene to laugh at me as I scarfed down a half serving of Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese Lasagna while standing up—insurance against the possibility that maybe Billy might serve me something odd for dinner like squid or peacock, so that at least my stomach wouldn’t scream with hunger when I demurred about just not having that much of an appetite—or laugh at the fact that I did so with a paper bib tucked inelegantly into the scoop neck of my nondescript, nonawful black dress.

  She really would have laughed her ass off at that one.

  And Hillary wasn’t on the scene to give me a gal-pal hug or a kiss, wishing me the best of luck with my evening despite her own qualms, as I sailed out the door.

  If Hillary kept things up the way they were going with Biff, I really was going to need to get a cat.

  Billy’s cottage, were it not a small part of a much larger estate in Westchester, would have been impressive in its own right. Certainly, with its Cape Cod architecture, flower boxes in the windows, and green-and-white porch swing, it was cozier and more finished-looking than anywhere I’d ever lived.

  “Baby!” he greeted me at the door.

  This was the first time I’d seen him without his tux on and in khaki pants, loafers sans socks and pink oxford shirt, he looked downright…naked.

  “Yup,” I said awkwardly, climbing up the three porch steps. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Are you late?” The perfect host, he glanced at his watch, as though needing to verify I was indeed late, rather than doing what I would have done if a date were an hour late, which would have been to make the date feel guilty.

  “I got lost,” I said, something about being there with him making me feel slightly out of breath, as though I’d run the whole way over. “Twice,” I added. “But it was only my fault once. The other time, there was a detour.”

  “Well, you made it after all.” He smiled. “That’s the important thing.”

  He offered his arm and led me inside. A part of me felt as if he was the smoothest thing since black velvet or Cary Grant, and not in a good way; a part of me was eating up every second of the royal treatment.

  This was almost better than a new pair of Jimmy Choos. Maybe this was what other women went through life feeling like? Maybe this was what it felt like to be treated like a goddess by a man whose nickname wasn’t anything like “The Weasel” or “The Rat”? I tried to think, if I were to come up with a nickname for Billy, what would it be…

  Well, of course it would have to be “The Gambler.”

  “Baby? Earth to Baby?” He gently tapped on the side of my head. “Are you in there?”

  “Oops, sorry,” I said, blushing. Even though I’d been with him for a few hours at Foxwoods, even though we’d spent the whole day and a good part of the night together in Atlantic City, it had been so long since I’d been on a date proper, I needed to get my proper-date sea legs back on. I was going to need to remember that being in a room with a male human being actually meant interacting with that male human being.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked, gesturing around.

  I thought that, just like the exterior of his home was nicer than anywhere I’d ever lived since moving out on my own, the interior was, as well.

  “I know,” he said ruefully before I could pronounce a verdict, “it looks like a gay interior designer did it, doesn’t it?”

  “Well…”

  Well, I didn’t say it, I thought, taking in the floral chintz and brocade, as well as the other fabrics I’d never be able to put a name to, not even if you held my Momo Flats–clad feet against the fire, gently roaring in the small fieldstone fireplace. “What can I say?” he said. “That’s the dad in me coming out.”

  “You have kids?” I blurted. Sure, if he had kids, I’d need to know at some point, but this was a rude awakening I wasn’t ready for. He could have waited until after feeding me at least.

  “Oh, no,” he laughed. “I meant ‘the dad’ as in ‘my dad.’ He was a gay interior designer, at least he was after Mother and I moved back to England, and I guess he just rubbed off on me.”

  “But I thought you said…” I stumbled. “Wasn’t your dad married to your mom for several years?”

  “Oh, yes. And if he wasn’t gay before he met her, he certainly was afterward. I never saw him again after he moved out, but as you can see, he left behind him a legacy of femininely refined taste. I’ve found in the past that some women are put off by all this—” he gestured “—but I’ve lived with it for so long, I can’t imagine being without rose and vine patterns everywhere. Now what can I get you to drink? Champagne? Diet Pepsi?”

  “Lime…?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Come.” He crooked his finger at me, invited me into the kitchen, opened the fridge: there were at least two rows of Diet Pepsi Lime in there.

  “I remembered,” he said, “your asking the waitress if she had any when we were in Atlantic City and I figured it must be a particular favorite of yours. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t run out.”

  That was so thoughtful! See? If Hillary had been around to warn me about him earlier, I could have called her on my cell phone right now to tell her how wrong she’d been.

  “So.” He waited patiently. “Which would you prefer, the champagne or the Diet—”

  “Oh, the champagne, please,” I said. “But just one glass, maybe two. I’m driving, after all.”

  Expertly, he undid the foil wrapping and extracted the cork from a bottle with an orange label.

  “I entertained and rejected Perrier-Jouët, Moët, Piper Heidsieck and Roederer,” he said, “in favor of this very lovely Veuve Clicquot. I don’t know about you, but I just love saying Veuve Clicquot.”

  “I don’t know about you,” I said, taking the flute, “but I try to avoid saying things I know I’ll mispronounce.”

  He laughed as though I was the wittiest woman ever. I can’t say I thought what I said was all that funny, but by the time I was halfway through my first glass of Veuve Clicquot, I was ready to accept his obvious assessment that I was as funny as Jon Stewart and Ellen DeGeneres combined.

  “Do I smell something…burning?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. Or maybe it was the bubbles from the champagne.

  By now we were seated on the floor, backs propped against the rose-covered couch, and I was thinking that his pink shirt looked awfully nice right next to my black dress. Maybe his pin
k shirt and my black dress should get closer?

  “Oh, shit,” he said, swearing uncharacteristically—really, it was as surprising as if Queen Elizabeth said “fuck” at tea—as he leapt to his feet. “And I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  I raced after him into the kitchen, champagne glass in hand. I wasn’t sure exactly why I was racing. It just seemed like a good moment to express my solidarity for whatever was going on. Host races, guest races, he races, she races, my kingdom for a horse and then we all move on.

  As he grabbed an oven mitt, I entertained the vague notion that at my own home, I didn’t even know if we had an oven mitt, let alone where to find it. Then he was unceremoniously yanking open the oven door, from which tiny wisps of black smoke emerged.

  “Shit,” he said again.

  “What were those supposed to be?” I hiccupped, trying to adopt a look of grave concern as I studied the two charred rectangles on the baking tray.

  “They were supposed to be homemade pizza pockets,” he said in dismay. “I remembered how in Atlantic City, you asked the waitress if she could turn your pizza into a pocket somehow, so I made my own dough from scratch, made my own sauce from scratch, then I grated fresh cheeses over the whole lot and gently folded them into pockets.”

  He’d done all that for me? Omigod, he was trying to impress me.

  “Oh, well,” he sighed as he threw in the oven mitt, totally missing the look of adoration I was bestowing upon him, “I suppose there’s nothing for it. You toss the salad while I call Domino’s. At least we’ve still got the champagne to drink.”

  Throughout the salad, throughout the Domino’s, throughout the second bottle of champagne, Billy remained charming. He even did a romantic reminiscence of the time we’d spent thus far together in casinos, which was very touching until a sore subject came up.

  “And what was with that…yo-yo guy, the one we keep running into every time we turn around?”

  My back stiffened at his insult to Chris. True, Chris wasn’t the smoothest guy in the world and he did drop his yo-yos an awful lot for someone who was trying to get taken seriously as a semiprofessional at it, but still…

  Then I had to laugh, though, as Billy began opening and closing his Craftsman cabinets. “Yo-Yo Man? Yoo-hoo! Yo-Yo Man? Are you stalking us, by some chance? Are you hiding in the flower box with the fresh basil? Oh, Yo-Yo Man!”

  Maybe it was the Veuve Clicquot, but it was funny at the time. And, despite feeling a guilty twinge about Chris, I laughed along with Billy. Besides, what did I owe to The Yo-Yo Man, who was really only Furthest Guy, anyway? I was with The Gambler.

  “How about—” Billy’s eyes flashed “—a game of cards?”

  “I think I’ve had too much to drink,” I said, suddenly realizing how drunk I was.

  “Come to think of it—” I burped “—I think I’m too drunk to drive.”

  Billy put his arms around me, pulled me close, tilted my chin upward with one hand and looked deep into my eyes.

  “Too drunk to play cards,” he tut-tutted, “too drunk to drive. Are you too drunk for this?”

  He lowered his face so that his lips were just a breath away from mine and then stopped. Taking the bait, I leapt at the chance, meeting my lips to his.

  “No.” He shook his head after a moment. “I guess you’re not too drunk for that.”

  I liked that first kiss. I wanted more kisses like that.

  Moving closer into his arms, I sought his lips with my own again.

  For a time, he kissed me back, but even through my drunken haze I sensed that he was more distant this time, that he was somehow removed.

  And then he drew away, studied my face.

  “You know, Baby, I really would like to show you my bedroom right now. I’d like to take you in there, remove every stitch of clothing you have on, some of them with my teeth, then I’d like to kiss every inch of your body, fulfill desires you don’t even know you have…”

  Take me! Take me in there! My mind half screamed, as I tried to move yet closer into his arms again, practically falling into him. So what if I’d originally insisted on driving myself, my reasoning being it would keep me from drinking too much and falling into bed with him on a drunken whim. But I’d changed my mind about the drinking. I’d changed my mind about the bed. If there’s one thing regularly drilled into women’s minds, it’s that it’s our prerogative to change our minds.

  “But I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said sadly, shaking his head.

  “Why? Why can’t you do that?”

  I wanted him to do that. Oh, how I wanted him to do that.

  “Because it wouldn’t be right,” he said, chastely, kissing the tip of my nose. “Because it wouldn’t be fair,” he said, tauntingly kissing my neck.

  “So be unfair, be unfair! I won’t tell!”

  “No, I’m afraid not. If you really are too drunk to drive, if you’re too drunk to play cards with me, then I can’t possibly take advantage of your condition. Tell you what, you can have my bed, I’ll get blankets and set myself up on the couch.”

  What was with guys these days? First Biff wouldn’t sleep with Hillary right away, or at least not until the fourth technical date. Now Billy wouldn’t sleep with me right away. What was wrong with doing it right then? I was old enough! I had my own condoms!

  “Really, Baby,” he said, “as hard as it is to wait, I must resist you. We can do it when we get to Vegas. You know—Sin City?”

  15

  It goes without saying that not only did I have a champagne hangover the next day, but I also had the raging depression to go with it as I drove myself home from Billy’s cottage in Westchester in the brutally clear light of a crisp autumnal morning. If I were still a virgin, the correct phrase for my state would be “still intact.” But what is the correct phrase for a twenty-eight-year-old woman who can’t persuade the man she desires to sleep with her, despite his professing a similar desire? There wasn’t a whole correct phrase for it. There was just one correct word.

  “Loser.”

  “You are so not a loser,” Hillary said after I’d said as much to her.

  Arriving home, I was surprised to find her there. I would have thought that, at the rate they were going, they’d spend the whole weekend together.

  “What are you doing home from Biff’s so early?” I asked after calling Elizabeth Hepburn’s house to see how she was doing; it was a daily habit now, checking up on her each morning to make sure she was still all right.

  “What are you doing wearing Friday night’s clothes on Saturday morning?” Hillary countered.

  “How do you know these were last night’s clothes?” I asked.

  “When have you ever worn a black dress on Saturday morning?” she countered.

  “I had a date with Billy,” I said. “I drove myself there, but I drank too much and had to wait until this morning to drive myself home.”

  “Biff had an early golf date,” she said. “I told him that true love was one thing but that there was no way I was going to start playing a sport I hated just to impress him and that I’d see him later. Besides, I missed you.”

  “Have breakfast yet?” I asked.

  “Nah, I was waiting for you,” she said. “Cocoa Krispies?” She waved the box cheerfully in my direction.

  “Nah. I’ll change and then we can go out.”

  “Out? You mean ‘out’ as in to a restaurant, a place with a real menu, where I can maybe get a full brunch with pancakes and eggs and bacon? A place where they maybe don’t have Cocoa Krispies on the menu? But it’s never your idea to go out to eat. I always have to drag you kicking and screaming. What has this man done to you?”

  She was right. I was changing too quickly. I needed the security of old habits.

  “Let me just hop into the shower and while I’m in there, you can pack a Ziploc with Cocoa Krispies so I won’t starve.”

  And, while waiting for the water in the shower to heat up, I could always sit on the toilet and get
a quick round of Sudoku in.

  Hillary was in pig heaven as she dined on Belgian waffles topped with peaches and cream, chocolate-chip pancakes, a spinach and chèvre omelet, and about a half pound of bacon at the New England House.

  “Never mind what Billy’s done to me,” I said, watching her shovel it in. “What’s Biff done to you? You’re eating like you’re in training to get big enough to have bariatric surgery someday.”

  “I can’t help it,” she said, spooning in another bite of the fluffy omelet, a piece of spinach briefly adhering to her front tooth before her tongue swiped it away. “I eat like this when I’m in love. But don’t worry, I burn it all right off, too. Being in love for me is like magic.”

  “Hill,” I said, “I’ve known you for years and I’ve never seen you eat like this before.”

  She shrugged, snapped a piece of bacon in two, munched. “That’s ’cause I’ve never been in love before.”

  “Then how do you know this time it’s for real?” I asked.

  “Believe me,” she said, “when it’s real, you can’t miss it.”

  “Oh, so now you’re some kind of expert?” I couldn’t keep the cynic’s half sneer out of my voice. I know it wasn’t very attractive of me, but how could she be so sure? I mean, if a person has never had a thing before, then how can they know that the thing they have is that thing?

  I said as much, to which Hillary replied, “You just know.”

  “Oh, thank you, wise swami.” I salaamed her. “With circular reasoning like that, you could start your own religion.”

  “Okay, I know it sounds lame when I put it like that, but trust me, if it’s real, you don’t even have to ask yourself if it’s real. You just know.”

  “More coffee?” the waitress offered Hillary, pointedly ignoring me.

  Hey, what was I here, chopped liver?

  But then I remembered the waitress’s scathing look at my clothes when we’d first walked in—my jeans and T-shirt seemed perfectly clean to me, but apparently they weren’t good enough for her—and remembered the sniff she’d emitted when I pulled out my Ziploc baggie of Cocoa Krispies and ordered an empty bowl and a glass of milk. So maybe she was worried about her tip, but Hillary had ordered enough food to feed a family of four, so she needn’t have worried. Certainly, she didn’t need to ignore me like that.