Pug Hill - Alison Pace [23]
“Has he told you he loves you yet?” she asks. Mom isn’t one to beat around the bush. I, on the other hand, have been known to beat around the bush and have even been known to take some solace in that bush. Solace, it seems, is nothing if not fragile.
So, yeah, there’s that. Evan has never told me that he loves me. It’s one of the problems with the Evan thing. I told him I loved him once. The fact that I was drunk when I said it, that it was midnight on New Year’s Eve at that, and the fact that I most likely didn’t mean it at all outside of the context of that “Old Lang Syne” moment, when you just want someone to love and want that someone to love you back, has become severely overshadowed by the fact that Evan didn’t say anything back.
If you go by what my mother says is acceptable and not acceptable, six months of dating with nary an I love you to bandy about, is six months too long. I consider my answer, consider lying and think how much easier that would be. But I also consider how things would be different for me right now if I hadn’t lied by omission so many times about how afraid I am of public speaking.
“No,” I say, resigned.
“Schmuck,” she says, and to hear her say it, it all seems so simple. I wonder if it really is, even as I simultaneously try to push the thought from my mind.
“No, Mom, he’s not a schmuck,” I say, my mind kaliedescoping onto the very first hours of this year.
“No, um, honey, I think that maybe he is.”
“He’s not,” I say, again, letting every tense cadence in my voice loose, free to scurry down the phone line, all the while thinking that maybe he is. Mom doesn’t say anything else; it’s not a talent you can teach, knowing how to usher a pause into a conversation so that even silence sounds disapproving.
“Mom,” I tell her, this time more firmly, “Evan isn’t a schmuck.” What does it say, I wonder, that with all the time I have spent thinking lately that Evan is indeed a schmuck that right now I’m so motivated to jump to his defense? A little voice, one of the dramatic ones, pops into my head. “Oh, what does it mean?” it exclaims, arms theatrically outstretched. I refuse to indulge it. Really, I have too many other things to think about.
“Okay, Mom,” I say again, once the screaming silence has become far too much to bear, approximately two and a half seconds later. “I’m going to be late.”
“What are you going to be late for?”
I look over at my cell phone, lying forlorn on the table, The New School catalog lying next to it in a way that I want so very badly to believe is hopeful.
“I’m going to meet Evan,” I say. I’m going across town, I think, back over to the Upper East Side to have a drink with my boyfriend, even though his drink of choice is Scotch, and I hate the smell of Scotch, even though if anyone shuns their Judaism, it’s Evan, and even though all his friends are so Biffy, all their girlfriends so Buffy.
chapter nine
Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game
An hour later, and I am sitting next to Evan on a banquette in the library bar at the Regency Hotel. The squash-playing friends are in a different area of the bar with a group of Junior League-type women, only the occasional caw-caw sounds, the intermittent, “Oh, Brandon, really, stop,” belie their existence. Evan is crunching on his Scotch-soaked ice cubes, there is such a determination in the way he crunches them so. I am eating M&M’s. The Regency has these big glass urns everywhere, filled with M&M’s; their very presence makes everything else about the place infinitely more enjoyable. I grab another handful and turn to face Evan. He is my boyfriend, I think, my supporter, my confidante. I can tell him this. I take a breath.
“I think I’m going to sign up for a public speaking class,” I blurt out.
“Yeah?” he says sort of distantly, looking