I grab some bags of frozen berries out of the freezer case and toss them into my basket, wondering if it would be too forward to call Gael and invite him over for cake even though this cake may be a complete disaster. I take out my cell phone and the scrap of paper I’ve been carrying around in my pocket in case an emergency occurs where caller ID does not record his phone number, and I am unable to call him back if I have bad reception at the grocery store. (I am also in that window when you plan for any possibility no matter how far-fetched.) I call Arianna instead, which is the safer choice.
“Any word?” she asks.
I can hear the sewing machine humming in the background. In addition to her freelance work for the designer, she is a sought-after seamstress, hemming the swingy pants legs of many a
New York
socialite. Beckett gives his greeting by screeching in the background.
“Nothing yet. Can I come over tonight with an angel food cake?”
“You’re baking? Good for you. Why don’t you come over after Beckett goes down, and we can eat it and get fat together. I’ll take you down with me if you’re going to ply me with sugar.”
“It does have a lot of sugar. An inordinate amount of sugar for something that is supposed to be angelic,” I say, glancing at the shopping list. “If I stay home, I’ll just stare at my cell phone and the clock.”
“Then come over here. Are you in the zone?”
Arianna, of course, knows all about the zone. She is the one who labels every increment of time from the moment you hand over your phone number to a period of time two weeks later without a phone call.
“I am in the zone, and I’m alternating between humming and feeling dizzy.”
“That’s bad, sweetie,” Arianna tells me, and I know that it’s true.
This is very
very
bad.
A single, divorced woman, not completely over her ex yet, pining after a Spanish photographer.
This is bad bad bad.
He calls while I am
reading the recipe for the third time, moving my lips as I go through each step.
Preparation is the key to success
, my high school gym teacher once told us, as if knowing the rules of field hockey would get us anywhere in life.
But it’s not terrible advice over-all, especially in baking, where it’s sort of in the same genre of “Measure twice cut once.”
I stare at the caller ID, heart pounding. Gael Paez. Two days. In zone terms, this is perfection. Any time before the second day and the guy seems too desperate. Rob Zuckerman, for instance, started calling the day after our date. I have been letting his calls go to voice mail for two weeks because I am too chickenshit to pick up the phone and tell him that while he is really nice, I’m just not interested in dating another lawyer-trying-to-make-partner. Perhaps I should come up with a better strategy than avoidance, since five phone calls later he still hasn’t gotten the message.
I’ve already fallen back into bad dating habits of wanting the kind of man who makes me wait.
Gael says hello as if he isn’t quite sure whose number he has called, and my heart sinks. “Hello?” I ask back. There is a moment of silence and then Spanish spoken at rapid speed and finally, his voice returns to the line at full volume. “Right as I dialed your number, a friend asked me directions. Hello, Rachel Goldman, how are you?”
“I’m fine, Gael Paez,” I say, closing my cookbook and sitting down on the stool in my kitchen. We are on a full-name basis. Which can be formal or it can be intimate. I decide that I’d rather have it be intimate. I wonder if Gael still smells like cinnamon and sex. “How are you?”
“I have been giving a lot of thought to your desire not to go back to work at the library,” he admits. “To be a cooking travel writer, instead. And I think I have some solutions.”
“A cooking travel writer who juggles?” I suggest.
“Well, these solutions are quite wordy. Maybe it would be better if we got together, and then I could tell them to you.”
“But what if they’re no good?” I flirt.
“Getting together could be a complete waste of time.”
“Oh no, I worked hard on these ideas,” Gael says with mock seriousness. “I will make it worth your while.”
“Are you going to cook for me?” I question. “I cooked for you.”
“I will do my version of cooking. It’s called going to a restaurant. I may not know how to make pasta, but I can buy it quite well.”
If I had only waited a few weeks, Gael Paez could have been the first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life instead of Rob Zuckerman, who spent five hours in
Bali
. That’s the whole problem with this not-knowing-what-the-future holds thing. Arianna is always talking about trusting that the next step will become obvious, but I’m not so sure this is the best way to live. A few weeks—that’s all that separates me from the best first-post-divorce-date story of all time from the most boring story of all time. Just as a few hours a day was all that separated Adam from the home life, the married life, I’d thought we both wanted.
Wait, I am not supposed to be thinking about Adam right now.
I am on the phone with Gael Paez, Madrileño photographer, who smells like sex. I am supposed to be concentrating on that.
So I imagine my ex-husband on a dark, empty sound stage, standing there expectantly as if he’s waiting for the right time to shout his lines. I picture my hands, triple the size of his tiny image (think Mike Teavee after he shrinks himself in the original
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
), shoving him off the stage while he trips over his own feet and shouts out feeble, silent protests.
Well that’s what he gets for popping into my head at an inopportune time.
“Oh, I know all about that whole restaurant thing. I used to be that way myself. So you’re an armchair chef?”
“What is that? ‘Armchair chef’?”
“It’s like an armchair traveler. Someone who reads about traveling rather than doing it,” I explain.
Gael likes this term and repeats “armchair chef” several more times before he finally gets around to asking me on a date. “How about this Saturday night?”
Shit. I have plans with my sister, Sarah, which I would normally cancel, but the lunch date includes her husband, Richard, and my niece, Penelope. I do some math in my head, calculating out the time it would take to return to my apartment in Murray Hill from Park Slope, shower, and get dressed in something that says, “No sex tonight, but it’s a definite possibility in the future,” with Arianna’s help.
“What about a late meal? Eight?”
“That is late?” Gael asks. “Eight is perfect. I’ll come to your apartment, and we will go be armchair chefs.”
“I’m a real chef now,” I remind him.
“Okay, real chef,” he corrects. “I am looking forward to this, Rachel Goldman.”
“So am I, Gael Paez,” I respond.
And I mean it. He doesn’t realize how much I truly mean it.
Despite being angel cake-less
(how can I be expected to attempt baking after securing a date?), I head over to Arianna’s apartment after Beckett is asleep, carrying a package of Pepperidge Farm cookies and a bottle of semi-expensive wine.
We are toasting my return to the dating scene as well as becoming a finalist for the Bloscars as well as celebrating the fact that I don’t need to take my blog commenters’ advice (“Call the guy after three days,” was their consensus), because he has already called
me
.
Plus I have decided not to write about him again. It is too risky in case we don’t end up married with 2.4 kids, and he finds my blog posts in the future while I am licking my wounds. He knows already, at the very least, that I do have a blog, even if he hasn’t asked for the url.
That is the whole problem with using blogs as free therapy. At least in therapy, you state your situation, and you get to hear the words outside your head and receive feedback from another person. But how can I discuss the anxiety I feel over spending the evening alone with Gael, of finally being attracted to a man other than my husband, in a public forum such as a blog? What if he’s secretly reading it, and we sit down to dinner, and he knows exactly what I’m thinking and feeling in the moment?
“You can tell if he’s reading your blog. I don’t mean definitively, but there are ways of figuring it out,” Arianna tells me mysteriously, turning down the volume on the baby monitor. The baby monitor is completely pointless in a small,
New York
apartment. I can hear the “monitor Beckett” gurgling at his mobile in unison with the real-life Beckett in the other room.
“How? And how would
you
know? You are more computer-deficient than I am.”
“I obviously knew about the Bloscars when you didn’t,” Arianna points out. “I read blogs. I read articles in the
New York Times
. My finger is on the pulse of the World Wide Web.”
“Hardly,” I say, cracking open the Milanos. “So how do you know?”
“You can install trackers on your blog, and then it tells you who has been on.”
“Wait,” I tell her, suddenly panicked. “Do other people know that I’ve been on
their
sites?” Though I haven’t gone back in months, right after the divorce, I spent more than a little bit of time still visiting Adam’s photograph over at his law firm’s website. Now I imagine the IT staff gathered around the computer, cracking up as they see my name popping up every night around
when I couldn’t sleep.
“You don’t see a name,” Arianna says, “but you do see an IP address. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but you can tell where the person came from. Do you want to find out if Gael’s reading?”
Arianna, it turns out, knows exactly what she is talking about.
We turn on her computer and it boots up slowly, giving us time to eat through a layer of cookies.
She takes me to a site called Sitestalker, which sounds dirty, as if I’m by the window in a trench coat waiting to flash everyone who visits my site.
I set up a profile and follow the instructions to add the tracking program to my site. It’s relatively easy even if my computer skills are limited to being proud that I’ve learned how to add hyperlinks to my blog posts. We sit there, staring at the counter on zero.
“Why isn’t it adding
us
?” I ask, clicking back and forth to my blog open in a separate window. “Did we do it wrong?”
“Try closing down your blog and reopening it,” Arianna suggests. Lo and behold, the counter refreshes with one, lone visitor. I chew on my lip, hitting refresh a few more times, but we’re the only people reading my blog tonight.
Seeing that in black-and-white feels quite lonely. I poke around on the site and see that we’re logged as coming from
New York
,
New York
. We figure out a way to label Arianna’s IP address, and she comes up on the main screen under her name instead of a series of numbers.
“It makes me feel better to see that it’s you reading instead of a string of numbers. It feels more human . . . less mechanical,” I tell her.
“But
you’re
reading right now.”
“I don’t mean now. I mean, in the future, when I log on to check who is reading, and I see your name. I’m trying to have a sweet moment here, connect as humans rather than allow the cold plastic-and-metalness of computers to come between us.”
“Hit refresh again,” Arianna commands.
I hit refresh and stare at the number on the screen. Twenty-one. Not just me and Arianna. Twenty-one people have been reading my blog while Arianna and I figure out Sitestalker and eat through two levels of Milanos.
Holy shit
. I click through each of the links, staring at the different lists of information. They have been on for a range of two seconds to fourteen minutes. They are from
London
,
England
;
Reston
,
Virginia
;
Brooklyn
,
New York
, and elsewhere. They are entering from blogrolls and comments and links inside posts. Who the hell are these people, and why didn’t I know they were reading before this point?
We hit refresh again, and the number jumps. Forty-nine. As we sit there, making our way through the final layers of Milano cookies, the number jumps into the hundreds and then two hundred, finally hovering close to three hundred before Arianna tells me that she’s getting tired.
“But who
are
these people?” I ask for the fortieth time.
“Sweetie, people love your site. You can’t go by the number of comments they post. I
knew
there were more people reading it than you thought. First of all, your blog is funny. I mean, you really are a great writer. People connect with your story, with how honest you are and how much you lay your heart out there. It’s not just your cooking stories. It’s the divorce and when you write about Beckett or me or your life now in
New York
. People want to connect with a whole person, and you let them. Some of the cooking blogs are so boring. They’re just dish, dish, dish, recipe, dish, dish. But you tell stories. You have meat
and
potatoes. Did you like that? Was that a clever food reference for your writing?”