On our third date, Jay and I went out for sushi. In an enormous, dimly lit room, behind big white plates decorated with curls of white or pinkish flesh, tiny mounds of rice and wasabi, and shreds and flecks of vegetable, we swapped bar and bat mitzvah stories, and Jay told me about the first time he’d had sex, how he and his high school girlfriend had shared a bottle of wine in the room at the Days Inn that they’d gotten, and he’d ejaculated on her thigh and spent five minutes apologizing before he realized that she’d passed out. After the check for a hundred and twenty dollars came we admitted to each other that we were both still starving, and hurried out into the frigid November night, holding hands, mitten to mitten. We race-walked to the Burger Bar, hidden behind heavy velvet curtains in the lobby of Le Parker Meridien, and ordered two cheeseburgers, plus an order of fries and a brownie. Jay had a beer; I had a chocolate malted and licked ketchup off my fingers, saying, “I know it’s cool to love sushi, but I just don’t.”
“Since we’re confessing our secrets,” Jay began. I sat up straight. So far, Jay had been wonderfully transparent, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get guy. Had that been a lie, or too good to last? He tugged at his sleeves and finally said, “I don’t know how you feel about fur, if you’re one of those anti-fur people, but I figure that if this”—and here he gestured with one of his hands at the beer, the burgers, the table, and me—“is going to turn into a thing, I should tell you that there’s a fur in the family. My bubbe gave it to my mom, and my mom gave it to me, to give to the girl that I marry.”
A flush spread across my face. I wanted to sit for a minute, to cherish the possibility of actually marrying this guy, of someone liking me enough to want to be with me forever. I examined myself, looking for trepidation or anxiety, but all I felt was calm and happy. I was glad I’d found Jay, and thrilled that the hunt would be over, that I could relax into a relationship and stop trying so hard, keeping up with my manicures and my highlights and my leg waxing, making sure my date dresses were dry-cleaned, gobbling Altoids so that my breath would always be sweet, skipping desserts even when I wanted them. “Why wouldn’t your sister get it?”
“Robin’s a vegan. Hasn’t eaten food with a face since she was eight. And she’s not one of the quiet, don’t-rock-the-boat kind, either. Her ring tone is ‘Meat Is Murder.’ ” Jay leaned back in his chair. Unlike Andy, who was always jigging and tapping, Jay could sit in a chair or lie on my couch as still as a lizard sunning itself on a rock. “I don’t know. I think it’d be different if it was a mink, but it’s not. Sheared beaver. Doesn’t that sound pornographic? My bubbe used to wear it on High Holidays.”
“Of course she did,” I said. You rarely saw furs in Florida, but the handful of times I’d been to synagogue when the temperature had dipped below sixty degrees, out they came. The ladies would fan themselves with their announcement brochures, with their coats draped over their tennis-tanned shoulders and their handbags hanging from their golf-muscled forearms.
“So you’re fur-tolerant?” He looked so funny and so hopeful that I laughed.
“When I was six I had a rabbit fur coat. In Florida. With a matching muff. Which also sounds pornographic.”
“Matching muff,” Jay repeated. Underneath the table, his knee bumped mine. It retreated, then returned, pressing firmly, and I could feel myself getting flushed and wobbly.
He leaned across the table and kissed my cheek, then nuzzled the spot just below my earlobe. I shivered, letting my eyes slip shut. “You’re a cutie,” he whispered in my ear.
“You’re a sweetheart,” I whispered back.
“Are you busy tomorrow?”
I didn’t even try to be coy, to make up some excuse or tell him something about needing to check my calendar. “Busy with you.”
Over the spring and the summer, we went to restaurants and movies and plays. We spent afternoons in parks and museums. We strolled across the Brooklyn Bridge—from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so it didn’t bring up memories of that terrible, wonderful day—and had falafel at the flea market. We ventured to Jamaica Plain in Boston because Jay had read that a restaurant there had the best samosas in the world; we sampled bulgogi in Queens and arepas in the Bronx and poured liquefied chicken fat on our potatoes at Sammy’s Roumanian on the Lower East Side.
Jay was sweet and funny and endlessly solicitous, always offering to carry whatever packages or bags I had, always holding doors. At restaurants, he’d pull out my chair and stand when I left the table; in bars and clubs, he’d stake out someplace comfortable for me to sit. I could get used to this, I thought again, on a bench at Rockefeller Center, with Jay kneeling in front of me, lacing up my rented skates. Out on the ice, he held my elbow as I giggled and slid into the wall. My cheeks glowed underneath my wool hat, he looked handsome in his blue plaid scarf, and every time a voice spoke up in my head, whispering Not Andy, informing me that while this guy might be a perfect match on paper, he didn’t make me feel the way Andy had, I would tell the voice to shut up. Andy had left me, not the other way around. I’d loved him, and he’d left me, and now I had to move on.