The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [94]
“Yep.”
He pulled the cork out of a bottle with a pop. “How old is she again?”
“She’s thirty-five and miraculously still has acne.”
“Well, cheers to that,” he said, and handed me a glass. We clinked and both took a sip.
Matt thought for a moment. “Sometimes it’s good to make a clean break, to have less reason to think about it. You and Ben haven’t spoken in weeks, right?” he said. I nodded.
“With me and Jill, just the other day I got an e-mail from her, saying she was mad at me for something I apparently did when we were dating,” Matt said. He went on to describe how his ex-girlfriend, Jill, had nagged him because she found out he had gone on a tour with “Wildman” Steve Brill recently, and one time while they were dating Jill had been talking excitedly about Brill’s tours and Matt had shown no interest whatsoever.
“So three years after we broke up, I can still be a bad boyfriend,” he concluded.
“That doesn’t sound right at all,” I said after a pause.
“Nope.”
We spent the rest of the night talking about failed relationships and thankfully more pleasant topics, gossiping, cooking black beans and rice, and putting on CD after iPod track after record. By the end of the night, I felt about eight hundred times better than I had earlier in the day, almost jovial. I knew in my heart that I was over Ben already. But rejection, and especially betrayal, are hard things to swallow. They can be treated only by friends who know how to make light of the situation, I think.
That weekend, I went to a birthday party in Williamsburg. When I left the party, it was only eleven thirty or so, and the spring night was mild and crisp. I was in good spirits, enjoying the air against my face after having been inside the stuffy bar. So I picked up my phone and dialed Karol, who lived nearby and who I could bet was hanging out somewhere in the neighborhood. She was. She told me to come meet her at a bar where she was playing pool with a couple of friends.
Almost immediately after joining them at the table, I met Nick. He and a friend were standing by the pool table watching Karol’s game, since they had written their names on the board to play next. He had shaggy dark hair and a two-day scruff, and he leaned in and started talking to me suddenly as if we were old pals. He stuck around over the next hour or so, and we chatted in between watching and playing rounds of pool. He said he was in New York for the summer only, heading off to grad school in Chicago in the fall. In the meantime, he was working at a coffee shop and picking up freelance translation jobs on the side. I told him what I did and mentioned my food blog. As a way of explanation, I’d handed him my minicard for the blog.
Around two or so, Karol and I were still hanging out and shooting pool, but Nick’s friends were piling into a car outside. It had begun to pour; splatters of rain and lightning were showcased through the windowpanes from where we were standing, and Karol and I resolved to wait it out before going home. We ended up staying for a couple of hours longer and at least that many more drinks.
When I got home, there was already an e-mail in my in-box from this Nick fellow.
“On the off chance that your handing me your card was motivated by something other than career advancement ... ,” it began.
It was short and to the point. Basically, he wanted to go on a date.
I told Karol about it on the phone the next day.
“So are you going to go out with him?” she said.
“I don’t know. Maybe. What’d you think of him?” I asked.
“I totally can’t even remember,” she said, groggily. “But you thought he was cute, right?”
I had. It was just one of those things, plain attraction.
“But I have serious concerns that he may be younger than twenty-five,” I said.
“Now that is highly possible,” Karol said, with a firmness that made it sound like she was finally waking up a little.
My guess on Nick’s age was based on the crowd at the bar that night, which was rife with barely of-age drinkers, and the fact that