“Just yourself. I can pick you up at your apartment.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“I’d love to see your place.”
“It’s tiny.” He pinched his fingers together for a visual.
“It’s New York.”
He seemed at odds with himself, and I assumed it was because I was essentially asking to invade his personal space. “I’ll meet you there,” he said again.
“All right. I’ll text you the address.”
He gave a smile, a shy one, my first glimpse that Arden might not be as confident as he seemed. I was relieved. Despite whatever mystique he was cultivating, I wasn’t looking for perfection.
3
the dinner party
When I pitched the idea of an impromptu dinner party to Bitzy for the sole purpose of getting to know Arden better, she was enthusiastic to say the least.
“Where’s he from?” she asked while I prepared the salmon filets by poking slivers of garlic and rosemary into the pink flesh.
“Florida,” I said.
“Florida?” she asked as if it didn’t comport. “Miami?”
“No, the Gulf Coast.”
“What’d he do there?”
“I don’t know. Go to the beach? Golf?” I imagined Arden lounging on the sand in one of those skimpy bathing suits he modeled, his tanned skin glistening with sweat, the fine hairs of his thighs catching the sunlight. Then I dressed him up—white shorts that hugged his firm ass and a pastel polo, something preppy and clean, with a visor on his forehead or maybe a ballcap. I wondered then what clique he might have been part of in high school. He had the looks and physique to be one of the popular kids—a jock maybe—but he lacked the conformity. A puzzle indeed.
“Listen,” I said. “Go easy tonight. No twenty questions.”
She smiled. “But that’s practically our schtick. I’m the nosy one, you’re the polite one, and together we unearth your potential suitor’s skeletons. Then you proceed to ignore one red flag after another until it ends in a screaming match on the street and broken glass everywhere.”
“Or computer bits,” I said. One of my exes threw my laptop off the fire escape to make the point that I’d been ignoring them. (Point taken.) Thank God I’d had my manuscripts backed up on the cloud. I didn’t know if I attracted dramatic types or if I drove my partners to do batshit crazy things, but of the two serious relationships I’d had, both ended badly.
And then there was Franco.
“I really do have tunnel vision when it comes to men,” I admitted.
“Which is why you need me to filter out the crazies. Why else do you think I agreed to have a half dozen people in this tiny-ass apartment? I cleaned my bathtub for you.”
“I really like him,” I said.
“You know it’s not me you have to worry about. It’s Franco.”
Franco Sampere was a friend of ours who worked on Wall Street. He’d been my first roommate at Columbia and had often spent holidays with me and my family, rather than fly home to Spain. We fooled around off and on during college and a few times since then. We’d agreed on numerous occasions that we were better as friends, but he could still get a little territorial.
“I’m more worried about Liam,” I said. “When he gets going…”
Bitzy nodded. “We need new friends.”
Our guests arrived shortly thereafter. Franco brought Marquis, a male entertainer he’d met at a gay nightclub in Chelsea. Collette and Aparna were housemates who arrived together with a tiramisu from Collette’s family’s patisserie. Liam came with one of his writer friends, Charlemagne Snodgrass, who claimed some distant relation to the American poet W.D. Snodgrass, though their connection was dubious at best. Charlemagne had once told me my work was perfectly adequate for escapist fiction. (I hadn’t asked for his opinion.)
Bitzy thanked Liam for the wine—a Chianti and an expensive Cabernet—and said she’d aerate them before dinner.
