Pug Hill - Alison Pace [13]
A waiter comes to take our drink orders. I order a white wine spritzer. I look over at Evan and smile. His eyes aren’t all lit up for me like Brandon’s are for Courteney. His eyes don’t say, “I love you, Muffin.” His eyes say something more along the lines of, “Why can’t you order a normal cocktail?” Evan thinks a white wine spritzer is not a normal cocktail. Evan thinks it’s the kind of drink a person orders when they want everyone to be ashamed of them.
“So, how’d you two meet again?” Courteney asks me, and I can see Evan’s jaw tense up. He leans forward, jumping in to answer, in case I’ve forgotten.
“We met at the Met. Hope works there.”
Evan thinks it’s just easier all around to say we met at the Met. He thinks this is a nice story, and perfectly plausible, as if, on occasion, I did leave the Conservation Studio in the middle of the day, to stroll leisurely around the museum, striking up conversations with random passersby. As if Evan were the type of person to be at a museum, which he isn’t, ever, let alone in the middle of the workweek, which is when, ostensibly, I would have been there, you know, making new friends left and right.
“That’s so nice,” Courteney says.
Evan looks over at me, and smiles, and then stealthily winks. He crunches down on an ice cube from his Scotch. I’ve always hated the smell of Scotch, but when I first met Evan I thought it would be a good idea to not let the Scotch bother me. I don’t think that anymore. I don’t smile back at him, or wink or lend any of the previously lent agreement, any of the previously lent feelings of, oh, look at us, aren’t we bonded because we have this secret, which really isn’t a secret so much as it is a lie.
I notice that the light from the tremendous chandelier in the center of the room is bouncing off the gold buttons on Evan’s navy blue blazer. It’s a rip-off really, if you think about it, to go on JDate in the hopes that you might find yourself a nice Jewish boyfriend, and wind up six months later at The Union Club with Evan. I mean, someone like Evan, in my mind, he’s lucky. He’s one religion and not two. Why not just be Jewish? Why the WASPy squash club, I wonder, obviously not for the first time. Why add all that in?
I listen to the caw-caw around the table, rising up above us and heading to the chandelier. Evan and Brandon are laughing now about something that has to do with a hedge fund. Evan, by the way, works at a hedge fund, and I think Brandon does, too. To be completely honest, I have no idea what actually goes on at a hedge fund, no idea how all these people who work at hedge funds actually spend their days. It’s been explained to me; it’s just one of those things that refuses to sink in. A little bit like love, I think, even though thinking things like that can’t possibly help anything. I smile, and occasionally I ask Courteney a polite question or two about the upcoming nuptials, less because I’m interested and more so that later Evan doesn’t say, “Hope, you really weren’t being very friendly at all.”
Evan’s talking about pheasant hunting now, and I try as hard as I can not to hear. I stare at the melting ice cubes in my drink and wonder if the identity crisis so deeply ingrained within me is what drew to me Evan in the first place, as Evan is so clearly in the middle of one.
On our way home in the taxi, Evan reaches over and strokes the back part of my upper arm. Don’t be fooled. The way he does it is not in a way that is affectionate or kind. It is, I’m sure of this, much more in a way that wants to say, do you ever use those arm weights I got for you? I’ve wondered quite seriously at times if he and my mom are somehow in this together. Had one of them called the other and had they aligned themselves into some nefarious Evan/Mom axis of