Who Do You Love(91)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

By June, the weather was brutally humid, but Amy insisted that I walk with her to SoHo, then join her for a drink. “Here’s to love,” she said, lifting her Champagne cocktail. “I signed you up for JDate.”

“Oh, no. No. Please no.”

“It’s not up for discussion,” she said, handing me her phone so I could see my profile. At least she’d used a good picture, I thought bleakly, a shot from when I’d been a bridesmaid at Pamela Boudreaux’s wedding, my hair drawn back in a chignon, with a single white camellia behind my ear.

“Just go on ten dates,” Amy said.

“Five,” I bargained.

“Eight,” she countered. “Look, if you don’t get out there you’re just going to spend every Saturday watching Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally on your couch.”

“And that’s wrong because . . . ? ”

“There’s a guy out there for you,” Amy said. “You have to open yourself up to the universe’s possibilities.”

“Did your yoga teacher say that?”

“No. I think I read it on a napkin at the new salad place.”

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “What if I already met the guy out there for me? Only he dumped me for a swimsuit model?” As far as I knew, Maisie did not solely model swimwear. Still, whenever I described her, I called her a swimsuit model. It sounded so much worse than just “model.”

“Honey,” she said, “Andy was not the guy for you.”

“How do you know?”

“Because if he was,” she said, “he’d be here. Or you’d still be there. You’d be together, and you’d probably be engaged.”

It was hard to argue, and easy to log on to the website, sort through the hundreds of guys, like they were entrees on a Love menu. Lots of them looked good and sounded funny and interesting. Then again, I thought, how hard was it to look presentable and sound acceptable online? On the Internet, every guy was a catch.

“It’s a numbers game,” Amy told me. She counseled me not to get too attached too soon, to develop a thick skin and keep it moving, setting up dates with other guys even while I was waiting to hear from a promising prospect. “Prepare for the worst,” she’d said . . . but the worst turned out to be so much worse than I had ever imagined.

My first encounter was with a charmer named Nate, an off-line fix-up and a fraternity brother of Pam’s cousin Martin. I arrived at the agreed-upon bar, a place in Midtown near his office, ten minutes early, and was sitting with a glass of chardonnay when Nate showed up, wearing fashionable eyeglasses and carrying a cool canvas bag. He was a little more jowly than he’d appeared in his picture. In repose, his face had a kind of smugness, an expression that said I have sampled many of life’s finer things and expect to enjoy many more. “Hi there!” he said, his hand extended. The smile on his mouth didn’t reach his eyes, which were cool and assessing, moving around the room, possibly scoping for better prospects. “You’re Rachel?”

“I’m Rachel.” Greek life at our respective campuses would give us a solid ten minutes of conversation, I thought; his job as a speechwriter for the mayor and mine with the Family Aid Society would be good for another ten, at which point we should have finished our beverages and gotten some sense about whether we wanted to see each other again.

The hostess led us to a table. A waiter approached. Nate asked for Scotch as I swallowed a yawn. “You feel like getting food?” he asked.

“I had a late lunch,” I lied. I hadn’t had lunch at all, had gobbled a granola bar on the subway uptown so my stomach wouldn’t grumble during our date. I didn’t want food. I wanted to be home, with my boots off and my bra unhooked, a bowl of Cream of Wheat on the table and Friends on TV.

“Okay if I order something?”

No. “Sure, that’s fine.”

“Lunchtime just got away from me. I completely forgot to eat.”

I didn’t trust people who forgot to eat. Andy, I remembered, didn’t trust short men. “They’ve all got something to prove,” he’d said. I pushed Andy out of my mind, wondering how long it would take to permanently evict his voice from my head, and tried to focus on Nate, who was not short, and was Jewish, and reasonably handsome, and perfectly acceptable.

Nate ordered a burger, well-done, with fries. “You sure you don’t want anything?” he asked, so I got some soup. Eight dollars for a bowl of watery chicken broth with mealy, limp noodles. I could have made an entire pot of the stuff for eight dollars, and it would have tasted better than what I’d been served. Soup had been one of my go-tos when I’d lived with Andy, healthy enough for him, indulgent enough for me. I’d learned to make three different kinds of lentil soup, split pea, minestrone, Italian wedding soup with tiny meatballs, pungent with garlic and cheese . . .