Chapter 3 #2
She’s furious, but there’s no use expressing it. To get him to go away, she says, “Hey, do you want to see my strategy deck for February?”
“Nope,” he says. He gives her desk one final thwap with his hands and leaves.
“Works every time,” Susan says to Frankie, who rolls her eyes.
She takes out her phone and texts Heather a series of question marks. Heather doesn’t write back.
Around noon, as the front desk fills with plastic bagged lunch deliveries, Susan pulls Tinder up on her phone again. At last, it shows her someone new.
Eliza, 26, Brooklyn.
Susan drops her phone to the ground.
It lands with a loud clatter on the concrete, though no one looks up from their computers. With trembling hands, she retrieves it, then turns the screen on and off just to make sure she’s not hallucinating.
It still says Eliza, 26, Brooklyn.
Her heart is pounding in her throat. Eliza?
Popping up on Tinder after all these years?
It’s like something she made up. A fantasy.
It doesn’t feel real. And it probably isn’t.
It’s likely just some other twenty-six-year-old queer named Eliza in Brooklyn.
There are definitely more than a few of them.
She tells herself to calm down. She tries, despite the fact that her blood feels like it’s made of lava, to breathe.
The woman in the photo doesn’t even really look like Eliza, at any rate.
Well, actually, it’s hard to be sure. She has a shaved head and huge round sunglasses obscuring most of her face.
She’s sitting cross-legged on a striped towel.
Susan can tell the photo was taken at Riis, the queer beach in the Rockaways, from the derelict building in the background.
Eliza is wearing red bikini bottoms and a ribbed white tank top, nothing under it, squinting in the sun directly at the camera.
Her nipples are clearly defined through the tank. She looks sandy and tan and very hot.
The bio reads, It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Eliza—her Eliza—never responded to Susan’s Missed Connection, though Susan had gotten a lot of replies from randos that said things like I’m not her, but I could be.
In the intervening years, Susan—who was busier and busier with work and, finally, a robust social calendar centered around her new life in Brooklyn—gave up on ever seeing, or hearing from, Eliza again.
She’s not going to get her hopes up this time, though she also can’t look away.
Susan tries to swipe to see more but it’s the only photo.
The picture is taken from above, and Susan looks closer at it, noticing some details strewn about the striped towel: a copy of Paper magazine, a bottle of Neutrogena sunscreen, a pack of American Spirits. Nothing that really tells her anything.
Regardless, she’s intrigued. Even if it’s not her Eliza, this looks like someone she definitely wants to meet.
She swipes right.
Her phone dings instantly. You have a match, it says.
Before she can think of what to say—her usual “hey there” with a rose emoji doesn’t seem at all appropriate for the potential magnitude of this moment—she gets a message: “I can’t believe you still have that fucking mullet.”
The office is not an appropriate place for the absolute mental breakdown she feels coming. Trying her best to appear normal, and not like the most monumental thing in the entire world just happened, Susan decides to take a lunch break.
She shares an elevator down with Drew.
“Hey,” he says. “Missed you last night.”
He’s wearing a crisp long-sleeve button-down shirt, an upgrade from his former uniform of black jeans and band T-shirts.
Susan suspects it’s to impress the new hires.
They’ve come from places like Condé Nast and Hearst and Wenner Media, and they take work much more seriously than any of the original team do.
She thinks most of them would be horrified to see how it used to be, all those mornings when she’d find Ben sleeping on the couch, not to mention the many nights when she herself slept there before finding an apartment.
Now there’s even a real HR person, though Susan isn’t sure how effective Linda is. She doubts, for example, that Linda had a role in whatever went down with Heather.
“How was it?” she asks, relieved to have a small reprieve from what’s happening on her phone, in her hand. “Ben seems pissed.”
“I mean, it was great.” Drew shrugs. “The artists were happy. Press showed up.”
“If only that were all that mattered,” she says. “Hey, do you know what’s up with the Heather thing?”
“No idea,” he says. “She’s not texting me back.”
He gets off on the next floor, waving goodbye like a cartoon of an office worker.
Once she’s outside and alone, Susan walks to the water and sits on a bench in the sun to reexamine her phone. It’s colder and breezier over here, and she pulls her hat down around her ears.
Instead of responding to Eliza’s message, she texts Katie. “You’ll never guess who I matched with on Tinder.”
Her phone starts buzzing.
Susan is laughing when she picks up. “Hi,” she says.
“Tell me who,” Katie says. “I’m in between meetings but I need to know.” Katie, who is working her way up the corporate ladder at a financial institution Susan has never heard of, lives vicariously through Susan’s dating app misadventures.
“Eliza.”
There’s a pause. “Oh my god?” Katie says.
“I know,” Susan says, relaxing a little bit now that she has someone to share the news with.
“How does she look?”
“Better than the last time I saw her. Like, very, very hot. Hold on, I’m sending you a screenshot.”
“Jesus Christ.” Katie gasps when the photo of Eliza’s profile comes through. She pauses, reading. “Oh, wow. I didn’t peg her for a Bell Jar girl.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ugh, Susan,” Katie says, and Susan can practically hear her eye roll. “Wait, look at her nipples! I would kill someone to have nipples like that.”
“I know,” Susan says. “I didn’t recognize her. Actually, I almost didn’t recognize her last time I saw her, either. I have such a vivid image of her in my memory and it’s never anything like what she really looks like.”
A woman walks by with a tiny white poodle in a baby carriage. Susan smiles at the dog. It growls at her.
Katie says, “Wow, it’s almost like you only see her as a projection.”
Susan groans. “Can we analyze me later?”
“Fine, but you have to tell me everything,” Katie says, even though she knows Susan will.
Susan gets an invite to a meeting that started five minutes ago and, with a sigh, rushes back to the office.
Susan is at her desk when Heather finally calls her cell phone.
“Heather, shit,” Susan says, and then lowers her voice. “What the fuck happened?” The thought of Rider without Heather is unbearable.
“Oh, girl, it’s the world’s most predictable story. It’s almost boring.”
“Are you okay?” She looks around to see if anyone is listening. Everyone is curled toward their computers, typing and clicking furiously, headphones on.
“I’m okay! Pissed off. Fine, though. Actually, I was hoping you and I could get together and talk about some things.”
“Of course,” Susan says.
“Lunch? Thursday? Don’t tell Ben.”
“Great.” She writes Doctor’s Appointment in her calendar.
“Meet me in Manhattan?”
“Manhattan,” Susan echoes. “Where is that?”
“There’s life outside those walls,” Heather says.
“Who woulda thought,” Susan replies.
On the subway home, Susan pulls up the Tinder chat. “I can’t believe you still have that fucking mullet.” Susan hadn’t meant to leave Eliza hanging. She hopes she wasn’t waiting around for a response.
“Wow, hi,” she writes. As soon as she hits send, her heart starts pounding. She can’t believe this is happening.
Eliza responds immediately. “Hi:)”
“You look different,” Susan says. An understatement.
“You look exactly the same.”
Susan pauses. She’s not sure what to write back.
Does she look exactly the same? Is that a good thing?
She does have the same haircut. She still wears band tees and skinny jeans.
She is sure her face is starting to look older, narrowing out a bit, her cheeks losing their roundness, but maybe not.
Maybe she does still look seventeen. She often feels like it, at any rate.
She looks up and notices that the man holding the pole above her is craning his neck to see her phone. She pulls it close to her chest and glares. He looks away.
When he gets off at the next stop, she writes, “Should we skip the banter and go get a drink?”
“I’m free tomorrow,” Eliza says, which means Susan has about twenty-four hours to try to stalk her online.
Susan orders Indian food on her phone so that it’ll be waiting for her at her door when she arrives home. Saag paneer, chicken tikka masala, veggie samosas, garlic naan. Enough in case Mia wants any.
“Hey,” Mia says from the small kitchen table as Susan bursts into the apartment, holding the takeout and her work bag, out of breath from running up the stairs. “Oh my god, did you get Indian food? That smells so good.”
“I was hoping you’d have some.”
“Have I mentioned how much I adore you?” Mia replies.
Susan kicks her snow boots off, her work bag landing with a loud thunk on the floor. “Oh fuck, my laptop,” Susan cries, but doesn’t bother to check if it’s broken. There are more important things to worry about.
Mia laughs. “Do you need help?” She’s already in her house clothes—a navy blue matching set—and a lit candle is making the living room smell like pumpkin pie.
“Sorry. I’m such a mess right now,” Susan says, and flings herself onto the couch, aware that she’s bringing chaos into Mia’s serene evening but unsure how to get it together. She begins eating her dinner so quickly that she gets the hiccups. She’d forgotten to eat lunch.
“What’s up with you?” Mia asks. She makes herself a plate while eyeing Susan with a raised eyebrow.