Love Monkey (7 page)

B
ut let's go back. To how we first got together. They weren't dates so much as doses. Powerful ones, unregulated by the FDA.

I'm sitting at my cubicle at work in the bleak of February, a phone to my ear. Am I asking for trouble? No. I'm asking for General Tso's chicken. It's eight o'clock at night and I'm ordering my fourth meal of the day. On my desk: menus, mock-ups, magazines, and my size nine and a half Oxfords.

“And pork fried rice,” I say. “How long?”

“Ten minute?” says the girl on the phone.

I hang up and go back to my editing chores. Just minding my own business. Actually, I'm minding the business of celebrities and criminals.

“Here's where Tom Farrell sits,” says Hyman Katz, the world's oldest copyboy, a man so at home in himself, so dedicated to the 24/7 task of Hyman Katzness that he is referred to only by his full name:
HymanKatz
. For thirty years he has worked at this newspaper, delivering faxes and answering phones and—whatever they did in the old days, transcribing Morse code, stirring vats of ink—as well as schooling succeeding generations of copyboys and -girls in sophisticated metropolitan bitterness. Today he's with a new copygirl. She peels a fax off her stack and gives it to me.

I look up. She smiles. Her face hits me like a beauty bomb. My eyes are as big as a muppet's.

Then Hyman Katz leads her away.

Whoa.

The fax in my hand is my only connection to her.

After that I don't see her in the office again. I don't know her name. I'm not even sure what department she works in. And if I see her again, what'll I say to her? “I'm Tom. And you're…incredible.”

A week later. It's Valentine's Day. I'm at Langan's after work with Bran Lowenstein, my default date for a couple of years. We know each other excessively well. Many times we've revealed intimate
things about ourselves in long discussions that took place in bed at two
A.M.,
except she was in her bed on West Eighty-seventh Street and I was in my bed on West Eighty-third.

Bran's eyes, her hair, and her sense of humor are equally black. The thing that makes you question her attractiveness at first is her nose, which I once playfully but not inaccurately referred to as a “beak.” She did not react well. No matter how well calibrated her sense of humor, no girl can stand having any part of her body made fun of. Really. Even her feet. Girls think it's unattractive to be well endowed below the ankle. They're convinced guys sit around in bars saying, “That Rebecca Romijn, she's all right I
guess,
but I hear she wears size-eleven pumps.” “Eww, no! I can't believe you said that, dude! I'll never look at her again! All that's left are her perfect face, hair, tits, belly, and ass!”

Bran's feet are gunboats, by the way. But as for her nose, after you've known her for a while, you realize it's her best feature. It makes me smile every time I see her. We meet up once in a while to attend movies—she makes a big feminist point of paying for every third one—and complain about our current boy/girlfriendlessness. I don't see her that much because a lot of the time she's on the road chasing a story. She's a producer on one of those prime-time news-magazine shows, the ones that say frozen yogurt isn't really low fat or your can opener can kill you or whatnot.

Being with Bran is a free upgrade in my masculinity. It always gives me this feeling of being a wolf in wolf 's clothing instead of a sheep in sheepish clothing. She's an inch taller than me, so she forces me to stand up straight. She thinks at least as fast as I do, so I have to pay attention. I saw this movie once where a kid with a deformed face stops in a fun house. The mirror that wildly distorts everyone else makes him look normal. Bran's my fun house.

“You look—” she says.

“Yes?”

“Like you actually thought about how you look,” she says. “For once.”

Bran doesn't carry a chip on her shoulder; she carries it in her hand, so she can jab you with it. I blame it on her name: Brandy, Brandy Lowenstein, maybe the only Jewish girl on Long Island with that particular handle. She has issues about this. When your parents name you after a beverage, people start to make assumptions. And brandy, as I never fail to remind her, is a Christian drink.

“Clothes look good on me,” I say. “Not to brag, but I have the build of a professional athlete. A sumo wrestler.”

My hair is long and wild, which gives me the quality of a rock and roller, or possibly a lone gunman. But I'm working it with the outfit: checked brown houndstooth jacket with taupe—“taupe,” another term I picked up from girls, along with “sage” and “celadon”—shirt and solid tie of royal blue. Yes, I wear a jacket most of the time. Gives me the illusion of shoulders. Surgical shoulder implants: could be huge. I've got the cool black pants, the polished Kenneth Coles. At some point in my late twenties I discovered: whatever else we may have going for us, all guys are subject to immediate disqualification by reason of footwear.

“I can't believe I don't have a date,” Bran says.

“I love you too,” I say.

“What kind of date are you?” she says. “You didn't even embarrass me at work with a huge fucking bouquet.”

“Maybe I'd send you flowers if you boinked me,” I say.

“Maybe I'd boink you if you sent me flowers,” she says.

“I guess we'll never know,” I say.

“I hate Valentine's Day,” she says.

“I love Valentine's Day,” I say. A petite brunette elbows her way next to me at the bar. Gives me a shy smile. I have to admit that whenever I'm with a girl, my natural impulse is to check out all the other girls to see how mine matches up.

“Hello, gorgeous,” I say, to piss off Bran. “Love the shoes.” All girls believe that their shoes are great, but they're so unused to guys noticing the things they're most proud of that sometimes you can get a solid three minutes' conversation out of this line. Also, as a bonus, a lot of girls assume you're gay if you're scoping their footwear, so sometimes you can catch them off guard and wing your way into an in-depth conversation before they know what hit them. Fly under their gaydar.

Something in the little brunette's face switches on. She starts to say something, but Bran cuts her off.

“You're sick,” she says with unneccessary volume.

My little brunette and her face move away.

“No really,” I say. “Look around.”

Little misery clots of single women are packing the place in co-supportive pairs and brave, nurturing triplets.

“At what?” she says.

“This bar,” I say, “it's your normal wood-paneled sports-on-TV-over-the-bar Irish joint. It doesn't have a ‘look,' it doesn't have a ‘vibe,' it doesn't have idiotic chung-a-chung-a-chung Euro-house trance music blaring over the stereo. This place is about alcohol and the men who love it. Yet even here there are many fabulous babes. On a normal night you never meet a great-looking girl who doesn't have a boyfriend. Tonight, though, all the women who don't have a boyfriend are thinking, I have to be strong! Someone take me away from my Kleenex and my
Pretty Woman
video! So they've all come out to play. Moreover, you know any woman you see tonight without a guy must be single, so you don't have to worry about wasting half an hour chatting up some honey before she drops the B-1 bomb on you.”

“The B-1 bomb?” she says.

“The boyfriend bomb.”

“Too bad you're stuck with me,” she says.

“Maybe I'm stuck on you,” I say.

“Oh stop,” she says.

I'm not sure if I have a crush on Bran. Every time I serve up the possibility, I can't resist adding a side dish of sarcasm. What I do know is, when I'm out with Bran in a bar full of hungry-eyed women, girls look at us. They're thinking, He's already girl-approved. Certified pre-owned. Say there are five single girls in a bar and they meet five guys. Four of the guys are single. But the other one casually manages to convince everyone that he is dating a supermodel. All of the girls will fight over the guy dating the model.

That's when Laurel, a slightly nervous junior reporter from the City Desk, comes in munching her hair and glancing around.

“Hello,” I say, leaning in with the obligatory welcome peck. I never know if I'm supposed to actually make contact and risk messing up their makeup. Or just be a total phony and whoosh by it. Then there's the whole saliva issue, plus which I'm drinking beer, which moistens my lips and could be misinterpreted as wayward spit. You really don't want the peck to lead to the wipe.

I introduce Bran to Laurel.

“Hi,” Laurel says. And she turns to pluck someone out of the crowd behind her. “This is Julia.”

That's when I notice the cutest little fax deliverer I've ever seen edging her way through the crowd at the bar. She looks excessively small, overwhelmed, bruised by the city.

“I'm Tom,” I say, as though I've never noticed her before, and our dippy little handshake is the first time I ever touch her. When did it begin, this handshaking with women? Do I go with the firm manly handshake the way I would with a guy and risk crushing their unsuspecting little sparrow bones? Or give them the soft touch and permanently burn the word “wuss” into the backs of their brains? Let's face it, nothing's simple when it comes to women.

Julia says nothing. Bran and Laurel immediately begin commiserating
about Valentine's Day. Laurel is killing time before she's supposed to meet her boyfriend, who despite having dated her for a year, didn't send her flowers today. The message couldn't be clearer if he had taken a long lease on some outdoor advertising: he isn't going to marry her. Laurel and Bran launch a lengthy school-of-Athens style debate on the subject. Every time they get too close to the obvious lesson, they shy away from it. Instead, they conclude that Laurel's best strategy is to guilt him into giving her some expensive gift. That way she can have a pleasing symbol of the feelings that he plainly does not have. Which will be suitable for ironically hurling in his face the day she finally goads him into breaking up with her.

“But maybe I'm just fooling myself,” Laurel says.

“He sounds like one of those worthless daydreamers who has absolutely no ambition,” says Bran. “Oh! Sorry, Tom.”

I'm not listening. I sip my half pint of John Courage and take a big swig of Julia. She's a merciless sight. Her skin is a Bain de Soleil ad. It looks as if it's been given a light rubdown by the Mediterranean sun every morning. Her lips are like the first bottle of wine you ever got drunk on. Her ash-blond hair falls expensively to her shoulders, dips ruthlessly over her eyes like a river of lust. I want to bathe in her hair. And those green eyes, as warm as a Christmas Eve fireplace, with dark accents in the hollows around them. They're soft needy poet's eyes, patient quiet eyes, the eyes of slight but perpetual disillusionment, eyes that say,
Sometimes I like to be hurt
. They've got real eyebrows above them, not those absurd penciled parentheses of the ritually overplucked. I don't think she's wearing any makeup except lipstick. The point of makeup is to look the way she does without it.

But after a while the evening turns strange, crazy patterns form. Laurel just leaves. Goes to hunt down her BF. And Bran, proclaiming that there is no potential BF for her in the bar, begins to make
noises about going home to watch the
Pretty Woman
marathon on cable, so I walk her to a cab. All these fabulous babes and I'm no one's BF. I haven't had a BJ since B.C.

Then an even stranger thing happens: Julia, that darling little critter, lingers. What are the odds on that? Then again, what are the odds of three unrelated Taylors all winding up in Duran Duran?

“Can I buy you a drink?” I say, stupidly. I am the kind of guy who never says, “Can I buy you a drink?” I sound like a Martini & Rossi commercial from 1979.

But she says a beautiful thing.

“Yes,” she says. It's the first word she ever says to me.

“I think I'll have a gin and tonic,” she says, but she doesn't take off her darling little yellow overcoat. “Darling”? Did I just say darling?

While I get the beverages, some barfly is chatting me up.

“You look like a writer or somethin',” says the guy, who looks like every guy I've ever met from Long Island except he's approximately two-thirds the size. “Sophisticated, right?”

“My socks match,” I say.

“You probably know all that stuff about similes and metaphors, right?”

“Sort of,” I say.

“So what's a metaphor, when you compare something using like or as, right?”

“That's a simile,” Julia and I say together, and we share a smile. I am endlessly impressed by a girl who knows grammar.

A thought: maybe I can keep her smiling. And by talking to this guy instead of her, I will be ignoring her. Being cool. Cool is the thing I am worst at. My close personal adviser Shooter is always telling me:
Act like a guy who talks to hot girls all the time
.

“I'm John,” the guy says.

“Tom,” I say. “The silent lady is my new friend Julia.”

They shake hands. Shake, shake.

“Thanks for the drink,” she says, lighting a cigarette and taking a sip of her G and T. “I'm going to quietly enjoy it.”

I don't smoke. I don't like smoking. I do like smokers. Most of the most interesting conversations I've had in this town could have been scraped out of my lungs the next day.