‘Well, I don’t know if I’d say we actually had sex,’ Janie said.
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ Alex asked. ‘You either did or you didn’t.’
‘Well, if he weren’t my boss, I probably wouldn’t have even counted it. Just in and out a few times – nothing major.’
‘That’s more than I’ve done in two years,’ I said.
‘Interesting. What I’m wondering is just how many other guys fall into the not-major-enough-to-count category. Janie? Wanna fill us in?’ Courtney asked. Alex returned from her fridge-and-hot-plate kitchen with a tray of shot glasses, each filled to the brim.
‘Why even bother to talk about The Very Bad Boy when we have our own very bad girl right here?’ she said and passed the glasses around the room.
We were off and running.
5
Another three weeks slipped by in much the same manner as my first month of unemployment, made only slightly less pleasurable by the daily phone calls from Will and my parents, who claimed to just be ‘checking in.’ Here’s how it usually went:
Mom: Hi, honey. Any new leads today?
Me: Hi, Mom. I’m pounding the pavement. There’s a lot that sounds promising, but I haven’t picked the perfect thing yet. How are you and Dad?
Mom: We’re fine, dear, just worried about you. You remember Mrs Adelman, right? Her daughter is the head of fund-raising for Earth Watch and she said you’re welcome to call her, that they could always use more dedicated, qualified people.
Me: Mmm, that’s great. I’ll look into that. [Channel flip to ABC as Oprah begins.] I better get moving. I have some more cover letters to write.
Mom: Cover letters? Oh, of course. I don’t want to keep you. Good luck, honey. I know you’ll find something soon.
Aside from those seven painful minutes every day when I insisted I was fine, the job search was fine, and I was sure I’d find something soon, everything actually was terrific. Bob Barker, Millington, an apartment full of trashy paperbacks, and four bags of Red Hots a day kept me company as I languidly surfed online job sites, making the occasional printout and the even more occasional application. I sure didn’t feel depressed, but it was kind of hard to judge, especially since I rarely left my building and thought of little besides how to maintain my current lifestyle without ever getting another job. You hear people all the time making statements like ‘I was only out of work for a week and I went crazy! I mean, I’m just the kind of person who needs to be productive, needs to make a contribution, you know?’ Nope, I didn’t know. My cash flow was in jeopardy, of course, but I figured something would turn up eventually, or I’d throw myself at the mercy of Will and Simon. It would be silly to waste time worrying when I could be learning genuinely valuable life lessons from Dr Phil.
Collecting the mail killed a solid ten minutes each day. Although I knew that the mail came at two each afternoon, I usually wasn’t motivated to fetch it until late evening, when I would grab the armful of bills and catalogs and bolt for the elevator. Thirteenth floor. Unlucky thirteen. When I’d hesitated before seeing the apartment for the first time, the broker had sneered, saying something like, ‘What, do you believe in astrology, too? You can’t seriously be concerned about something so ridiculous … not when it’s got central air-conditioning at this price!’ And since it seemed to be a distinctly New York phenomenon to be abused by the people you paid to perform a service, I’d immediately stammered out an apology and signed on the dotted line.
Today, luckily, my mailbox contained the latest issue of In Touch, which would occupy at least another hour. After retrieving it, I unlocked the door, scanned the floor for potential water bugs, and braced for the usual hysterics from Millington. She always seemed convinced that this was the day I would abandon her forever and met my homecoming with a frenzy of wheezing, snorting, sniffing, jumping, sneezing, and submissive peeing so frantic that I wondered if she might one day die from the excitement of it all.
Remembering the half-dozen training manuals that the breeder had thrown in ‘just in case,’ I made a big show of ignoring her, casually setting down my bag and tossing my coat and calmly making my way over to the couch, where she immediately leapt into my lap and stretched herself upward to begin the ritual licking of my face. Her little wet tongue worked its way from my forehead to underneath my chin, incorporating an unsuccessful attempt at getting inside my mouth, before the kissing stopped and the sneezing began. The first one sprayed across my neck, but she managed to collapse before the real groove got going and she sneezed a giant wet spot onto the front of my skirt.
‘Good girl,’ I muttered supportively, feeling slightly guilty that I was holding her in midair at arm’s length while her entire body shook, but a Newlyweds rerun was starting and the sneezing could last for ten minutes. I’d just recently reached the point where I could look at Millington and not think of my ex-boyfriend Cameron, which was definitive and welcome progress.
Penelope had introduced Cameron and me at some barbecue Avery had thrown when we were both two years out of school. I’m not sure if it was the shiny brown hair or the way his butt looked in his Brooks Brothers khakis, but I was smitten enough not to notice his tendency toward vicious name-dropping or the vile way he picked his teeth after each meal. For a while, at least, I fell madly in love with him. He spoke lovingly of bonds and trades, his prep-school lacrosse days, and weekend jaunts to the Hamptons and Palm Beach. He was like a sociological experiment – a not-so-rare but alien creature – and I just couldn’t get enough of him. Of course, it was doomed from the start – his family was a permanent fixture in the Social Register; my parents had once been on the FBI’s dangerous agitators list due to protest activities. But when paired with my job in banking, his aggressive preppiness went far in showing my parents that I wasn’t dedicating my life to Greenpeace. We moved in together a year after meeting, when both our rents went up at the exact same time. We’d been living together for exactly six months when we realized that we had absolutely nothing in common beyond the apartment, our jobs in finance, and friends like Avery and Penelope. So we did what any doomed-for-failure couple would do and immediately went shopping for something that could bring us closer together, or at least give us something to talk about other than whose turn it was to plead with the landlord for a new toilet seat. We opted for a four-pound Yorkie, priced at $800 per pound, as Cameron calculated for me more than once. I threatened to kill him if he announced one more time that he had, in fact, ordered entrées at Peter Luger bigger than this dog, and repeatedly reminded him that it had all been his idea. Oh, sure, there was the small issue of my being allergic to anything with fur, alive or stuffed, animal or outerwear, but he’d thought that one through, too.
‘Cameron, you’ve seen me around dogs before. I don’t know why you’d want to subject me – or yourself – to that again.’ I was thinking of the first time I’d met his family for a winter weekend in the Adirondacks. They’d rounded out the picture-perfect WASP gathering – real fire in the fireplace! no remote control! no store-bought logs! – with tartan-plaid J. Crew pajamas, free-standing decorative wooden mallards, enough alcohol to warrant a liquor license, and two loping, oversized golden retriever puppies. I sneezed and watered and hacked to such an extent that his permanently tipsy mother (‘Oh, dear, another glass of sherry should clear that right up!’) began making passive-aggressive ‘jokes’ about being contagious and his openly drunk father actually set down his gin and tonic long enough to offer me a ride to the ER.
‘Bette, don’t worry about a thing. I’ve looked into all of that, and I’ve found us the perfect dog.’ He looked smug and satisfied, and I mentally counted the days until the lease was up. One hundred seventy. I occasionally tried to recall what had attracted us in the first place, what had existed before the icy détente that had become the hallmark of our relationship, but nothing really specific emerged. He had always been a little dim, something that all the private schools had managed to mask but not repa
ir. He was undeniably cute in that clean-cut, Abercrombie-catalog-boy way, and he did know how to pump out the charm when he needed something, but mostly I remember it just being easy: we had the same friends, the same fondness for chain-smoking and complaining, and a nearly identical pair of salmon-colored pants. Could a good romance have been modeled after my relationship with Cameron? Well, no, I don’t suppose so. But his unspectacular, watered-down version of companionship in those weird, early postcollege years felt perfectly adequate.
‘I don’t doubt it’s a very special dog, Cameron,’ I said slowly, as though I were speaking to a third-grader. ‘The problem is that I’m. Allergic. To All. Dogs. You understand that sentence, don’t you?’ I smiled sweetly.
He grinned, undeterred by the best bitchy, condescending tone I could muster. Impressive. He really was serious about this. ‘I’ve made some calls, done some research, and I’ve found us – drum roll, please! – a hypoallergenic dog. Can you say “hypoallergenic”? C’mon, B, repeat after me, “hypo—”’
‘You found us a hypoallergenic dog? What, do they breed them to be that way? The last thing I need in my life is some genetic mutation of an animal that will most likely send me straight to the hospital. No way.’
‘Bette, don’t you see? It’s perfect. The breeder promised that since Yorkies have real hair, not fur, it’s impossible to be allergic to them. Even for you. I made an appointment for us to pick one out on Saturday – they’re in Darien, right near my office, and they promised to reserve at least one boy and one girl so we could have our pick.’
‘I have to work,’ I said listlessly, already vaguely aware that adding responsibility to this particular relationship was only going to sabotage it faster. Perhaps we should have just ended it then, but December’s such a tough time to find apartments, and the place really was a decent size, and well, dogs are cute and distracting … so I agreed. ‘All right, Saturday it is. I’ll go to the office Sunday instead, and we can go pick out our hypoallergenic dog.’
He bear-hugged me and told me all about his plans to rent a car and maybe visit a few nearby antiques stores (this coming from the boy who’d argued tirelessly to retain his beanbag chair when we’d combined our stuff) and I wondered if maybe, just maybe, this little genetic mutation of a dog was the answer to all our problems.
Wrong.
So very, very wrong.
Well, that’s misleading. The dog certainly didn’t fix anything (surprise, surprise), but Cameron was right about something: Millington turned out to be hypoallergenic after all. I could hold her, snuggle her, rub her furry little mustache right against my face without so much as a hint of an itch. The problem was that the dog herself was allergic to everything. Everything. Somehow, her tiny little puppy sneezes seemed endearing when she was tucked among her littermates in the breeder’s kitchen. It was adorable … the only little-girl puppy had caught a little cold, and we were there to nurse her back to vibrant puppy health. Only the cold didn’t go away, and little Millington didn’t stop sneezing. After three weeks of round-the-clock care and nursing – Cameron chipped in, I’ll give him credit there – our little ball of joy wasn’t improving, even with the nearly $3,000 we’d spent on vet consultations, antibiotics, special food, and two late-night emergency-room visits when the wheezing and choking got particularly terrifying. We were missing work, screaming at each other, and bleeding money in the process – my banking and his hedge-fund salaries were barely enough to cover the dog’s expenses. Final doggy diagnosis: ‘Highly reactive to most household allergens including, but not limited to, dust, dirt, pollen, cleaning fluids, detergent, dyes, perfumes, and other animal hair.’
The irony was not lost on me. I, the most allergic person on earth, somehow now owned a dog that was allergic to absolutely everything. It would’ve probably been funny if Cameron, Millington, or I had slept more than four consecutive hours in three weeks, but we hadn’t, and it wasn’t. What would most people do in this situation? I remember asking myself as I lay awake on the first night of the fourth sleepless week. A sane couple in a functional relationship would simply shuttle the dog right back to the breeder and take a long vacation somewhere warm and laugh about what would surely become a fond memory and funny future party story. So what did I do? I hired an industrial cleaning service to remove every piece of hair, every particle of dirt, every smudge from every surface so the dog could breathe, and I asked Cameron to leave once and for all, which he did. Penelope told me eight months later – with what I thought was a little more excitement than the event required – that he’d gotten engaged to his new girlfriend while wearing a kilt on a golf course in Scotland, and that they were moving to Florida, where her family owned a small island. That clinched it: everything worked out exactly as it was meant to. Two years later, the dog had learned to tolerate the smell of Wisk, Cameron toasted fatherhood in the family tradition with a stiff gin and tonic, and I had someone so excited to see me each night that she peed upon my arrival home. Everyone’s a winner.
Millington finally stopped sneezing and settled into a narcoleptic nap beside me, her little body pushed against the side of my leg, rising and falling with her rhythmic breathing, in tune to the TV that I constantly kept on for background noise. After Newlyweds, I stumbled across a Queer Eye marathon. Carson picked through some straight guy’s closet with a pair of salad tongs, describing items as ‘So Gap ’87,’ and I realized they’d probably be just as horrified to check out my closet – as a girl, I was probably expected to do a little better than the off-the-rack Ann Taylor suits, one measly pair of Sevens, and the cotton tank tops that constituted my ‘going out’ clothes.
The phone rang a little after eleven P.M. I held it and stared, patiently waiting for the caller ID to register my caller. Uncle Will: to screen or not to screen? He always called at odd hours on his deadline nights, but I was too exhausted from my day of nothingness to deal with him. I stared at it a moment longer, too lazy to make any real decision, but the machine had already answered.
‘Oh, Bette, pick up the goddamn phone,’ Will said into the machine. ‘I find this caller-revealing feature highly offensive. At least have the savoir faire to brush me off once we’re mid-conversation – anyone can look at a little computer screen and decide not to answer; the impressive accomplishment is extricating yourself from the real-time situation of actually speaking with the person.’ He sighed. I laughed.
‘Sorry, sorry, I was in the shower,’ I lied.
‘Sure you were, darling. In the shower at eleven P.M., just getting ready to go out for the night, huh?’ he teased.
‘Would that be so hard to believe? I have gone out before, you know. Penelope’s party? Bungalow 8? The only person in the Western Hemisphere who didn’t know where it was? Any of this ringing a bell for you?’ I took another bite of my Slim Jim, a snack I’d been inhaling since I’d discovered how much they horrified my parents.
‘Bette, that was so long ago I barely remember it,’ he pointed out thoughtfully. ‘Look, darling, I didn’t call to give you a hard time again, although I fail to see any reason why an attractive girl your age should be sitting home alone at eleven on a Thursday night, chewing imitation meat sticks and talking to a five-pound dog, but that’s neither here nor there. I just had the most brilliant idea of all. Do you have a minute?’
We both snorted. I clearly had nothing but. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I’m talking to a four-pound dog.’
‘Bette, listen to me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier, I’m positively idiotic for not seeing the potential, but tell me, darling, what did you think about Kelly?’
‘Who’s Kelly?’
‘The woman you sat next to at Charlie’s dinner at Elaine’s. So, what do you think?’
‘I don’t know, she seemed really nice. Why?’
‘Why? Darling, you are positively brain-dead these days. What do you think about working for Kelly?’
‘Huh? Who’s working for Kelly? I’m so confused.’
/> He sighed. ‘Let’s take this slowly. Being that you are currently out of a job and seem to be enjoying that fact a little too much, I was thinking that perhaps you would like to work for Kelly.’
‘Planning parties?’
‘Darling, she does a lot more than just plan parties. She chitchats with club owners and trades on gossip she has about other people’s clients to the columnists so they’ll write good things about her own clients and sends gifts to celebrities to convince them to attend her events so the press will as well – all the while looking very pretty when she goes out every night. Yes, the more I think about it, the more I’d like to see you in event-planning. How does that sound?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was thinking it might be good to do something, uh, you know, something sort of …’
‘Meaningful?’ he offered, pronouncing the word the same way one might say ‘murderous.’
‘Well, yeah. I mean, not like that, not like the parents,’ I mumbled. ‘But I do have a meeting at the Meals on Wheels headquarters tomorrow. Just a change of pace, you know?’
He was quiet for a moment and I knew he was weighing his words carefully. ‘Darling, that sounds lovely, of course. It’s always sweet to make the world a better place. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you that rerouting your career path in that direction puts you at risk of falling back into your Patchouli Rut. You remember what that was like, don’t you, darling?’
I sighed. ‘I know, I know. It just seemed like it might be interesting.’
‘Well, I can’t necessarily say that planning parties would be as interesting as helping the needy, but it would be a hell of a lot more fun. And that, darling, is not a crime. Kelly’s company is new, but easily one of the best – boutique-y, very impressive client list, and a great place to meet all sorts of wildly shallow and self-involved people and get the hell out of that hole in which you’ve recently sequestered yourself. Are you interested?’