Chapter 7
What do you wear to dinner with the perfect man?
Hair down. Contacts, not glasses. Makeup?
Regular. I’d learned the hard way on previous dates that trying something fancy with my makeup always ended in disaster.
Keep It Simple Stupid, or KISS, which was a rule I also applied to kissing itself, though it was doubtful tonight would end anywhere near the arena of tonsil hockey.
I carefully applied my mascara with my mouth open, as I always did.
(I’m not the only one who engages in this nonsensical act, am I?) No need for blush since I was already a little anxious-pink beneath the surface.
For a full-blooded Italian, half-Sicilian on my mother’s side, I was implausibly pale and quick to go red.
If not for my dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and penchant for rigatoni, I could have easily been mistaken for Irish—or, more likely, what some nefariously referred to as Black Irish.
My cell phone bleeped and I was sure it was Kevin canceling, but it was only Emily wishing me luck.
Actually, her exact text was: don’t fk this up.
But I knew what she meant. There was something suspect about this night, something I was missing and therefore bound to fk up.
This may sound to you like the idling hum of low self-esteem, but it wasn’t.
It was an indisputable fact that Kevin Hanson and I were not on an equal plane of hotness.
Every eligible woman and half the eligible men at Titan would have entered the Hunger Games for the chance at a date with him. Why was he pursuing me?
We met at Nougatine, which Emily had explained to me was “the more casual sister of Jean-Georges,” which sounded not so impressive to me at first. Was I not good enough for the fancier, more formal sister?
Should I read into the fact that Kevin had opted for the Edith Crawley restaurant over the Lady Mary?
But Emily assured me that Nougatine was in fact a respectable and highly regarded first-date choice—and no, its name had nothing at all to do with the nougat of a Snickers bar.
Kevin was waiting out front when I arrived, which I appreciated because I was five minutes early. I would have been fifteen minutes early had I not ducked into a Duane Reade to check my hair in the cosmetics-aisle mirror. I also helped myself to a squirt of hand lotion, so what?
Kevin was wearing a tailored blazer over crisp jeans and a dress shirt.
He waved when he saw me walking up the block, and I waved back, and then there was that terrible five or six seconds where you don’t know what the hell to do with yourself before you reach the person.
I tried to smile wide enough so he could see it and fought the urge to do something goofy—a battle I lost when I goofily brought my hands to my mouth and called out, “Helloooooo,” as if he were very far away.
He played along, waving his arms to and fro high above his head and shouting, “I’m over here!”
This was a good man.
After we were seated and starting on some wine, Kevin ordered for us—from the tasting menu, which turned out to be an unexpectedly large amount of food considering it sounded like a practice dinner before the real one.
The last guy I had gone on a date with (more than a year ago, a guy I met at my corner bodega while debating between a pint of Cake Batter Ben I could feel them burning up, the bastards.
At least Kevin was also blushing. “Seriously though,” he said, “I want to hear all about this nonprofit you’re working on. Talking with you the other day reminded me how stupid my job is, and how much happier I’d be doing something meaningful.”
“You do remember my real job is being Robert Barlow’s slave, right?”
“Aside from that, though. You give a fuck.” He stunned me with his sudden use of profanity. “That’s not something I’ve found in most of the women I’ve met.”
He was really going for it.
I smiled and looked down modestly.
“So come on,” he said. “Tell me more about it.”
When I looked up, he was pitched forward with his eyes wide. His whole demeanor seemed to be crying out, Touch me, pet me, love me. He was obviously a mama’s boy and possibly part Labrador retriever, but so what? This guy really liked me, or the idea he had of me. I had to keep that idea alive.
“Well . . .” I found myself stuttering as I searched my brain for all those smart-sounding words I learned at NYU’s Women’s Center meetings. “The thing is, we, as in our generation, we’ve tried to do everything right but we’re still . . .”
Kevin was holding his wineglass suspended in midair, so rapt he was by my manifesto.
“. . . People say we’re lazy and entitled. But the truth is, the deal we were promised growing up, if we work hard and get a good education, it’s really not working out. The dream we were sold, and the job market we encountered . . .”
I was killing it and not in a good way, but Kevin didn’t seem to notice.
He was nodding his moppy head, eyes intense, locked with mine.
“. . . And what about the people who aren’t even fortunate enough to go to college? How are they supposed to . . . if we’re struggling this much, what about them? It’s like, like institutionalized classism.”
Aha. There we go. Good liberal-arts vocab word, institutional classism.
Kevin set down his wineglass and reached across the table for my hand. “I couldn’t agree more. We are absolutely living in the midst of a new Gilded Age.”
His hands were softer than mine, I’m not even kidding. And they smelled of . . . what was that? . . . Drakkar Noir? Hadn’t anyone ever told him that was the scent of every girl’s eighth-grade boyfriend?
“I’d love to get involved in some way,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do.”
I had him, I really did, pubescent cologne and all. But no, he could not get involved. (That dog won’t hunt, Robert would have said.)
I fiddled with my napkin.
“It’s sort of my and Emily’s thing right now,” I said.
“Of course.” Kevin’s eyebrows settled in disappointment and then rose again in eager-for-purpose anticipation. “Though, you may need legal advice sometime.”
God forbid, I thought, and then waved to the waiter for more wine.