My husband and I do this terrible thing every two weeks. We call it Date Night, like we’re living fast city lives and have to designate time to have fun with each other. But here’s how Date Night goes: we go to a bar full of other couples, one of those candlelit places with red velvet on the walls and low tables made out of black marble, and we sit for hours, getting drunk and smoking and talking to the other couples. I try to keep up with the conversations the wives are having, but they have age-appropriate jobs and they use phrases I don’t understand, like “acquisition cost” and “lead conversion rate.” They talk too fast, they wear heavy earrings, and the drunker I get, the more their lips seem to twitter and metal sparks flash all around their heads. They asked me once what I did, and I told them that just that morning I had been on the phone for two and a half hours listening to an old man tell me his life story and why I should publish it. I had just listened, I never bothered to tell him that I had no say in the matter. The flashy wives weren’t sure what to say to this story, it was a very uncomfortable moment. Someone muttered “Oh, wowww,” and everyone silently nodded, until Karen or Jessica said something interesting.
When she sat on my desk later, her legs took up the whole room, they were so unbelievably long. That day I wanted her out of my office more than I ever had, but we were supposed to be office friends since we were the closest in age and since she was the only person I talked to when I ate in the break room. I humored her, but I almost wanted her to see what I’d just written on the desk calendar under her ass on the 15th of the month: Rat-Faced Whore Goes to NYC. Now that she had her promotion and was on her way to the city of dreams, where she would finally move in with her long-distance boyfriend, who would no doubt propose to her upon her arrival, a thousand pink roses in his arms and a thousand doves flying out of his ass, she tried to counsel me on my life.
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“You’re cute, you need to get out there and find someone,” she said, in that I’m-not-going-to-say-“before-it’s-too-late”-but-that’s-what-I-mean kind of way. She pointed at the framed Successories poster on my wall, the one with the guy swimming through the sunlit ocean on his way to the sailboat. “Opportunity: Don’t wait for your ship to come in, swim out to meet it!” she said. She had a huge mouth that looked like a flesh wound.
“You’re so funny,” she said flatly, like she was diagnosing a fatal illness she didn’t really give a shit about because she knew she’d never contract it.
“I can look at a person and know exactly what to say to make them feel like shit. I don’t know, it’s this uncanny ability I’ve always had.”
“I’m so sorry! I hope you’ll let me make it up to you!” I used my special inflection to make it sincere. He was leaning over staring at the hole. Then he stood up straight and laced his fingers behind his neck. “Let me buy you dinner.” I bent my knee in and stuck my hip out, tilted my head and made my body an uneven, vulnerable curve. He looked at me strangely. I was blinking excessively because I was nervous, and the glue from my fake eyelashes was itchy.
That’s when the shit-mouthed Queen of Great Ideas suggested we have a date night. To give us something to look forward to. Since all of her other ideas had worked out so well, I told Mark about it. That’s how we ended up going to the same bar to meet the same people every other Friday night.
