Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Rain in the city felt like the first squeeze of the painter’s sponge, more purge than cleanse.
Summer rain in particular released as many smells as it rinsed; like the difference between a dry dog and a wet one, New York City was a filthy animal.
Iris had recently learned there was a word for the scent of rain: petrichor, a pleasant, refreshing note with a cool mineral glint—but this rainwater wasn’t running through green grass or skipping over smooth river rocks.
A city shower ran through the sieve of overstuffed municipal trash bins, drenching their contents to fetid sludge; it flushed over soot-scuffed curbs and sluiced into the gutter carrying cigarette butts, the bones of cabbies’ chicken wing dinners, and a discarded condom like shed snakeskin; it flooded the rat warrens under sidewalk flower beds and sent dog-piss-soaked mulch chips floating away like tiny stinking barges.
Plus, it made Iris’s hair frizz. Worse with her new haircut. She had fallen victim to the evergreen scam that a bob will change your life, but so far her life still needed a straightening iron.
Iris had been tempted to postpone this first date, but that fertility consult scared her into open-mindedness.
Chris Hinge (app men had to earn their surnames in her contacts list) seemed fairly promising: thirty-eight years old, lives in South Slope Brooklyn, looked roughly the same in his profile pictures as he did in Google Image Search, with an interesting-sounding job at a film studio.
He was not a convicted criminal and he was on LinkedIn—that was all the verification a girl could get these days.
But his best feature, as far as Iris was concerned, was his adorable brindle-coated rescue pitty named Lola, cuddled close to him in multiple pictures.
As a single dog-mom to a beloved rescue beagle, Iris took this as a great sign of character.
Iris arrived at the designated cocktail bar on MacDougal Street and shook off her navy umbrella printed with dogs she liked to think were beagles but were more likely foxhounds, and deposited it in the bin.
She had already received Chris’s “Here” text, so she scanned the room for him.
A row of men and women sat hunched over glowing phones, surely waiting to meet a prearranged stranger just as she was.
Bars like this no longer felt like places to meet, mingle, and see where the night took you; dating apps had transformed them into dimly lit WeWorks for socio-sexual job interviews.
Identifying someone from photos in real life was always a little uncertain, but Iris thought she recognized the curly brown hair, five-ten-listed-as-six-foot man from her phone. “Chris? Hi, I’m Iris.”
Likewise, he took an extra beat to register her. “Oh! Hey!” He stood and they hugged lightly, hips apart. “Your hair was longer in your pictures.”
“Oh yeah, new haircut. Sorry, should I leave?” she joked, making him laugh. He had a pretty good laugh—she cared about that more than height.
“No, no, it looks nice. You look great.”
A fragile bubble of optimism formed in her chest as she took her seat. They placed a drinks order and got through an initial round of small talk before Iris landed on her favorite topic.
“Your dog is super cute. I might have swiped right mainly on Lola.”
“I get it. She’s way cuter than me. I named Lola after the Jacques Demy New Wave film,” Chris explained, like it wasn’t a top five popular dog name. He cut the pretension by showing her some puppy pics on his phone.
“Beyond. So how old is she now?”
“Almost five. She was my pandemic puppy, I wouldn’t have made it out of lockdown without her. That’s my baby girl right there.”
Iris felt herself warming to him. “Aww, that’s so sweet. I rescued my dog Hugo when he was around two, and I wish I had baby pictures of him! He’s thirteen. I hate that he’s aging, but he’s only getting cuter to me.”
“Old dogs are saints.”
“I agree.” Iris smiled; it was something she would say. “We should get them together sometime.”
“For sure. Thing is, Lola mostly stays at my parents’ house in Bedford now, she’s like obsessed with my mom. But my mom visits with her fairly often.”
“So you have shared custody?”
“Lola’s still my dog, but she just lives with them.
You know, it was great having a dog during lockdown, but now it’s not so easy, I mean, I still work from home, but my schedule is all over the place.
And I love to travel; getting inspiration from the world around me is essential to my creative psyche. But it’s not fair to Lola.”
Iris nodded politely while her image of a devoted dog-dad crumbled.
Just then the waiter arrived with their food, a slate of assorted charcuterie and cheeses, a ramekin of olives, and a basket of airy French bread.
Chris took the board but waved off the basket. “Thanks, we don’t need the bread.”
Like she hadn’t already eliminated him for dog-child abandonment.
“I’m sorry, did you want the bread?”
“Nah, I could skip it.”
“I’ve completely cut out sugar and refined carbohydrates, best thing I ever did for myself.” He proceeded to tell her about a billionaire who wants to live forever so he built a ranch in Wyoming where he raises all his own meat without antibiotics and believes bread is “literal poison.”
“Wow,” Iris replied, unwowed.
Chris pulled apart a piece of prosciutto with his fingers, used it to pick up a piece of comté cheese, and popped both into his mouth at once, not waiting to swallow before adding, “Nutrition is super important to me. I’ve tried all the diets: intermittent fasting, the bulletproof coffee thing, total-thirty, paleo, I mostly eat keto anyway—not for weight loss but for mental clarity.
The mind and body are not separate. You have to optimize your body’s health and performance to optimize your brain, you know? ”
“Totally.” Iris took a swig of her cocktail.
“But you know what was the real game changer for me?”
Iris shook her head and wondered if she could yawn without opening her mouth.
“Enemas.”
She nearly choked on her gin fizz.
“I know, it sounds crazy. But what you take out is as important as what you put in. Have you tried it?”
“Not on the first date.”
Chris laughed his mediocre laugh. “Our natural cleansing system developed when we were basically animals, eating only whole foods in the wild. Our gut biome hasn’t evolved as quickly as modern food processing. You need to help yourself detoxify.”
“Sometimes I drink cold brew, does that count?”
“Sadly, no. I grew up with this stuff. My mom is all about wellness and homeopathic medicine, she’s the one who got me into nutrition in the first place. She does it for me.”
“Does what?”
“The enemas.”
“Wow.” She meant it this time. Good God in Freudian hell.
“I’m sure she would comp you a session if you want to try it.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pa—” pass away from this conversation, she might’ve finished, but from the corner of her eye, she saw him: her ex, Ben.
He had just walked in, as if summoned by her humiliation, and he wasn’t alone.
He was beaming down at a tiny blonde hanging on his arm.
The girl was laughing with his denim jacket draped over her shoulders—a denim jacket Iris had bought him years ago—adorably soaked from the rain so that wet tendrils of her hair stuck to her décolleté and rendered her white tee translucent and even more clingy.
She looked fresh out of college. Meanwhile Ben looked, infuriatingly, great.
Worse, he looked happy. Worst, he looked up.
“Shit.” Iris snapped her head back to the table.
“But you really don’t see any—” Chris continued obliviously.
“No, I have a thing! I just forgot, then I just remembered, and I have to go. I’m so sorry.” She hadn’t seen Ben since they broke up six months ago. She was not going to see him and his new girlfriend for the first time while on a date with Enema Oedipus.
“You have to go now ?”
A nearby server briefly shielded her from view of the entrance. “Very now. Right now.” She began snatching up her things. “I’m so sorry!”
“I’ll get the check and walk you out.”
The server moved; she saw Ben speaking to the hostess, who waved a hand in their direction.
“ No! It’s on me, please.” She tossed twenty-one dollars on the table, which hadn’t covered two cocktails in Manhattan in years, but it was all the cash she had.
She was already slithering out of her seat and trying to sidle past him without fully standing up.
“Sorry meeting you—sorry, I mean, nice meeting you, sorry. ’Bye!
” She left Chris sitting in shock, his eyes blinking like a cleansed anus.
Iris kept her head low and drafted behind a busboy striding swiftly to the kitchen.
Stealing glances at Ben, whom the hostess was leading to a table dangerously close to her old one, validating that she really had no choice but to act like a psycho.
As Ben and Co. headed to their table, Iris made her escape.
She hit the sidewalk so giddy with relief that she didn’t immediately register the raindrops pelting her head. It was pouring. And her umbrella was—
“Iris!”
Currently over Ben’s head. He was standing with it outside the bar, looking at her with earnest concern, like he hadn’t just busted her cowardly retreat. He popped the umbrella above him like Mary Poppins. “Isn’t this your Hugo umbrella?”
She sighed in defeat and jogged toward him with her cardigan flopped over her head. “Yes, I just forgot it.” Sharing the shelter of the umbrella, they stood closer than they would otherwise, at least since their breakup. She felt his nearness like an electric charge. “I was in a rush.”
“No kidding. I recognized the umbrella in the bin as soon as I came in, and I wondered if I’d run into you. But then it was you who was running out. Is everything okay?”
“Totally.” An absurd answer, as she was so obviously out of her mind. She looked down at her leather sandals darkening with rainwater, because looking up at Ben’s face felt like she might kiss him, if only out of muscle memory.
“I won’t keep you, I gotta get back too. But you’ve been good?”
Iris longed to be the type of ex-girlfriend who appeared indifferent and cool, an ice queen but thriving . But in the presence of this man who knew her intimately, and after the day she’d had, she found it impossible to posture. “I’ve been better.”
Ben smiled kindly. “How’s Hugo, does he ask after me?”
Iris shook her head. “Actually, no. He was only in it for the socks.”
He laughed that great Ben laugh, and it set her aglow that she could still make him break.
“I suspected as much, but dammit, it still hurts.” He clutched at his chest as if wounded.
Her smile fell. His play-acting at heartbreak curdled her mood.
Reminded her that he was the one who had rejected her, blindsided her, wasted so much of her time, and wounded her so deeply.
She couldn’t chuckle at him pantomiming the visceral ache she still felt for him.
They weren’t friends yet. And it wasn’t his joke to make. “Can I have my umbrella?”
“Oh yeah, sorry.” Ben handed it to her, seeming to register the change in temperature with a new formality in his tone. “We should catch up properly sometime, when you’re not busy.”
“Sure.” She had to hold it high, since he was taller than she, and the wind made it unwieldy. The rain blew on her cheeks, like the tears she was holding back.
Ben took the openness of her posture as an invitation to hug her goodbye.
She stiffened at first. But pressed to his Oxford shirt dotted with rain, she inhaled his familiar skin scent, a mix of Ivory soap and fresh bread, warm skin under cool cotton, and she exhaled all the tension in her body.
She wanted so badly to give in to that safe scent of home in the crook of his arm.
Instead, Iris said goodbye and spun on her heel to walk briskly in the wrong direction from home, leaving Ben to jog back to the shelter of the bar. And she held back her tears successfully until Houston and Sixth.