Chapter 5 A Good Frame #2
Now I have a crush on a guy who wears tweed vests, and I’m learning a dance with neatly assigned leader/follower roles and carefully counted steps.
“Well, I hope you both come,” Helen replies, “because I have a feeling most people will bring their partners, and no one will ask us singles to dance.”
“That’s the best thing about us three,” Jody replies, glancing between Helen and me. “We’re all alone.”
I meet up with Hannah and her babysitter a few minutes later at the Taekwondo studio and reimburse the babysitter for the white uniform that she hastily had to buy for Hannah before class started.
“How did it go?” I ask Hannah as we wave goodbye to the babysitter.
Hannah demonstrates her new moves to me all the way down the street and then on the entire subway ride back to our neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Fortunately, the subway is nearly empty, so I don’t have to steer her away from starting an accidental street fight.
“Hann,” I say, as she practices her posture in the middle of the subway car, “why did you want to learn some kind of martial arts? Was a friend at school learning it?”
“I have to learn because Marshall said he could beat me up.”
“He said that at school?” Marshall is one of the boys I hear about a lot, and never in a good way.
She shrugs. “Nina says he can’t beat me up if I know martial arts.” Nina is her best friend, a tall, dark-haired girl with natural confidence and a tendency to egg on Hannah’s worst instincts.
“You’re not going to do that, right?” I ask gently. “Get in a fight with him?”
Hannah shrugs. “The best defense is a good offense. That’s what Nina says.”
Maybe we should just move out to a suburb, I think for the hundredth time, but then I would have an even longer commute and less time to spend with my daughter. As if she can read my mind, she looks over at me. “Are we going to move back to Atlanta?”
She does this sometimes: articulates the thoughts I am thinking right after I’ve decided not to say them aloud.
“No, sweetie.”
“Is Daddy going to move here?” The question feels like its own Taekwondo kick in the chest.
“I’m sure he wants to be closer, but he has to go where his job takes him. Musicians have to tour, and his gigs are changing, so it’s not easy for him to stay in one place.”
“Does he have to be a musician?”
She has never asked me that before. It saddens me that she’s finally old enough to understand that maybe Nick is a bit selfish. I pick my words carefully. “Some people have only one job that makes them happy. I think your father is one of those people. But I know he misses you.”
“Do you miss him?”
I force a smile. “He and I will always care about each other.”
Recognizing this is a dodge, Hannah turns and lets another kick fly toward the middle of the empty subway. “Right,” she says pointedly.
I remember what Ollie said about the elastic band that is supposed to exist between the leader and the follower in dancing, the invisible string that connects your chests, always pulling you back to each other.
The thing is, if one of you doesn’t care enough about the string, and keeps pulling farther and farther away, then the string can snap, and then the connection is broken.
You aren’t pulled back together anymore.
That’s how I feel about Nick. We were pulled farther and farther apart until something inside me broke permanently.
Ollie calls me that evening at a little after eight o’clock.
“Are you free this Friday night?”
“I can be.” I am already mentally filing through babysitter options.
“I’d really like to take you out to dinner.”
Something in his tone makes me fall backwards onto my bed like a teenager. That’s not good, I tell myself. I can’t be this mushy already.
“Sure,” I say, keeping my voice steady with effort. “That sounds nice.”
I remember something Brant said last summer when I called him and asked him to put in a good word so I could get my old job back.
I told him about the mess with Nick, and he listened with surprising sympathy and finally replied, “As soon as people know that you’ll do anything for them, that is when they really have you over a barrel. ”
Ollie and I meet at a chic little restaurant on Friday evening at the decidedly un-chic hour of 6:30.
I asked him to find a restaurant close enough to my neighborhood and a time early enough that I can still get home to start Hannah’s bedtime.
If he wants to date a single mom, this is the reality: no tumbling into bed together after the first date.
Not much tumbling into bed at all. I might as well make that obvious from the beginning; it would be worse to watch him slowly pull away as he learns what he’s in for.
Ollie lives on the Upper West Side, so I appreciate that he’s making the trek to Brooklyn just to make my evening a little easier.
He has chosen an upscale, quiet restaurant with seating under skylights in a back garden.
I notice as we enter the front doorway that two jazz musicians are playing quietly in the corner, and I immediately think of Nick and the occasional ‘mood music’ gigs he used to suffer through—patiently strumming jazz standards to the sound of clinking forks and murmurs about stock prices.
I close my eyes and make a face like I’m getting a blowjob, Nick used to say. Makes me look like I’m into it.
It’s a very nice restaurant, whatever Nick might say about it; it’s exactly kind of place I never go. Ollie glances at my little black dress and smiles.
“Another devastating dress, I see,” he says as we follow the hostess to a table in the corner.
“I had to go cave diving for this. It was shoved into the back of my closet.”
“Pining for fresh air.”
“I took pity on it. This is a mercy outing.”
“No mercy for me, clearly.”
He says it with enough amusement that I can’t tease him for such a slick line. How am I supposed to respond to charm?
A server comes over as soon as we are seated. “Wine list?”
“No, I think we’ll have some bottled water to start,” Ollie says without looking up.
I’m grateful that he remembered, assuming he said that for my benefit.
As he glances down at the menu, I feel like I don’t know him at all. It hits me in a wave, and I tuck my hands into my sides as I stare at the list of overpriced duck and sea bass entrees.
My white trash origins always sneak up on me at moments like this.
I can picture twenty-year-old Laura in a place like this, her eyes lined in black smudge, wearing a bustier instead of a shirt, telling Ollie she’d like to give him a blowjob in the bathroom.
When things get too quiet, she tends to crawl from the depths of my subconscious and try to get me to say something wildly inappropriate.
I can practically smell her hairspray and knock-off Calvin Klein perfume as I look over the menu.
I say nothing. I’ve inherited my mother’s tendency to like to blow things up, but I don’t have to act on it.
“So where did you grow up?” Ollie asks quietly. I guess we’re doing small talk, now.
“Nowhere as interesting as Australia,” I say. “How did you end up here?”
He shrugs. “Not my decision. My father is a businessman. Major player in Melbourne, but he always wanted to come to New York. I think he loved the movie Wall Street. Probably took the wrong message from it.” He frowns slightly.
“So when my older brother got accepted to NYU, my father moved the whole family here. I think he didn’t want my brother to conquer the city before he did. ”
“And did your dad conquer the city?”
Ollie shrugs. “He does okay. Not as well as he wanted to. That’s why he wanted me and my brother to become lawyers.
He thought that was the missing piece in his success.
I followed the path my dad wanted for us.
Undergrad at Fordham, NYU law. But my older brother rebelled, did a whole bunch of other things.
Worked on a fishing boat, drove around the country selling antiques. He eventually became an auctioneer.”
“An auctioneer? Like, ‘Going once, going twice…!’”
He grins ruefully. “He’s at Christie’s now, doing quite well.
You can make millions of dollars at that if you’re good at it.
He’s a real charmer. The kind of guy who can work a room.
” Ollie frowns; his charming brother definitely charmed his wife, and I wish Ollie knew that I knew, so we could talk about it.
“He’s more like my father than I am, in a lot of ways. I was the shy one growing up.”
“But you’re so loud and abrasive now.”
He chuckles. “My father was appalled when I chose tax law. He thinks it’s boring. But it was one of the few parts of law where nobody’s angry, sad, or injured.”
“Unlike criminal or divorce law?”
“Exactly.” Even divorce law seems like a loaded topic. Is there any non-loaded topic with Ollie?
“And the dancing?” I ask gently.
“That was Eliana, my ex. I started dating her when I was in law school and she was a senior in college, studying dance at Marymount. She was the driving force behind West Coast Swing. She wanted to learn it and then she wanted to compete. And I went along with it because it made her happy.” He shrugs.
“It was probably a little act of rebellion. My father is convinced that only gay men can dance well. And I used to do small things that annoyed him, just to prove him wrong.”
“But it must have been tricky when you were in law school, putting in time to compete.”
“It wasn’t that bad in law school.” He frowns, remembering.
“But once I got out, it was harder. I ended up quitting my job at a big law firm. That’s why I landed as a legal consultant to an accounting firm.
It was impossible for me to be on the partner track at Big Law, putting in billable hours all weekend, and still dance.
What I like about my job at Murano is that they genuinely expect us to be there from nine to five and then go home. ”
“So you can have a life.” I smile.