Up & Out - Ariella Papa [71]
“I just think we have to draw the line somewhere,” Kathy says.
“You’re right, Kathy,” Tommy says with a poker face. He’s acting like none of this fazes him, like he wouldn’t be much happier at home watching Star Wars again. I fear that inside he’s calculating the cost of this in his head. “You have to draw the line somewhere.”
The waiter comes back with the wine. Ron asks Kathy to taste it.
“No, Ron, you know better,” Kathy protests.
“C’mon, I showed you how to do it.” The waiter knows who is calling the shots and pours the wine in Kathy’s glass. Ron watches her sip it and nod.
“Excuse me,” I say to the waiter. “Is there a menu for Restaurant Week?”
“It’s at the bar,” he says haughtily. “I’ll get it for you.”
I smile at Tommy, who has perfected the art of showing no emotion. It’s something Ron could learn from. He is currently reprimanding Kathy for not tasting the wine properly.
“You just swallowed, you didn’t even taste it.”
“Ron, I wasn’t going to go through that whole rigmarole in the restaurant.”
“Why not? That’s how you taste it.” The waiter hands me a menu with the lunch fixed price on it—they aren’t doing dinner. I hate him and his attitude. I guess we have no choice but to order a plate of twenty-eight-dollar pasta. I point the word lunch out to Tommy and mouth, “I’m sorry.” He picks up his wineglass and holds it up and out to the arguing lovebirds.
“Here’s to just swallowing,” Tommy says.
We all clink his glass.
Sixty-five dollars apiece later, we climb up the five flights to our apartment. Ron and Kathy were kind enough to give us a ride back in their cab. Kathy insisted on paying. Tommy volunteered to sit in the front so as not to suffer through Ron’s stock trading ideas.
“I’m sorry,” I say in a heartfelt way.
“About what?”
“The cost of the night, Ron’s incessant talking, asking you to go.”
“What about the lack of beer selection and the fact that the waiter gave us an attitude for serving us food we were paying for?”
“I’ll never ask you to do anything like that again.”
“Oh, you can ask, I’ll just never go.”
“I’m sorry. This proves what I’ve always suspected about Restaurant Week. That it’s a scourge on innocent diners. I can’t believe Kathy is marrying him.”
“Why?”
“Did you see how he kept cutting her off?”
“She seems happy.”
“I think she just wants to get married.” Tommy shrugs, as he has been doing all night. Even though he is one of my only friends that I can still feel comfortable around, what I really need now is a girl to rehash this with.
I change my mind about how I feel about being unemployed from day to day. Some days I really can’t get motivated to do anything. Other days I find myself walking around the city or being really social, calling old college friends I haven’t talked to in a while and e-mailing Lauryn. Sometimes I start making lists of things I’ll have to do when my two months are up. One thing is constant; I am not going to get a job before I absolutely have to.
I often walk over to the air-conditioned twenty-five-screen movie theater on Forty-second Street. I hop from cool movie to cool movie, smiling at the ushers if they suspect me. Most day screenings don’t have a big audience and I feel like (especially with surround sound) I am momentarily in other people’s lives.
At times I feel so guilty. I know there are people out there who work a lot harder than I did. Not everyone gets a cushy thing like severance and that makes me feel worse and less motivated. From minute to minute my feelings and moods change. Someone has pulled the rug out from under who I was. I have no idea how to navigate my life.
My inertia is totally against the work ethic of my parents, but I feel so let down. No one owed me anything, but at one time I believed that the stuff I created was really for kids and now I know that it was for a network to try to sell to advertisers who wanted to brainwash kids. How could I have been so naive for so long?
So when I’m not feeling too bad about myself I tell myself that I deserve this for the time I spent on the front