See Jane Date by Melissa Senate Page B

clapped eyes on Mr. Uh-Huh?
    Amanda clicked off her cell, her blue eyes twinkling. She leaned forward at the table and whipped her long ponytail behind her. “Kevin Adams. Thirty-three. Senior Accountant. Lives in a brownstone off Central Park West. Jeff says all the admins in the office salivate over Kevin.”
    I almost spit out my mouthful of Cosmopolitan. It was fate. Kevin Adams was exactly who I’d described to Natasha! Right down to the brownstone on the Upper West Side.
    â€œHe sounds good, Jane,” Eloise said, nodding. “Damned good.”
    â€œDo it, Jane,” Amanda seconded. “Or it’s telling Dana and the Gnat you lied. It’s going out with Incinerator Man!”
    They’d mistaken my look of shock for disdain. I burst out into a grin and beamed at Amanda. “Tell Jeff to give him my number. At home and work.”
    Â 
    Eloise and I gave Amanda real kisses on the cheek and disappeared down the steps into the Union Square subway station. Both Grammy and Aunt Ina had made me promise never to take the subway. They refused to believe that the New York City subway system wasn’t the crime pit it had been in the seventies when they’d been “career women” with jobs in the garment district. Eloise and I swiped our metro cards in the turnstile and headed for the Uptown IRT line.
    A woman pretending to be the Statue of Liberty stood stock-still on a platform (she was painted silver), holding a torch. An upside-down hat in front of her had a few bills in it. Down a few feet, three teenagers played drums, an open drum case in front of them without a coin. Eloise and I stopped for a few minutes to listen to an overweight gospel singer. We each threw the change from the bottom of our purses into what looked like the case of an amp.
    We slipped inside the 6 train just as the doors were closing and grabbed two of the hard orange seats. A pack of teenagers huddled together playing a hand-held video game. An elderly man was clipping his fingernails. Two or three sad sacks read newspapers or the ridiculous advertisements lining the top rim of the car. And six attractive women, all in their late-twenties and early thirties, were dotted around, their Kate Spade handbags tight against them as they read reports, books or stared blankly out the dark windows.
    Looking at them depressed me. I was one of them. Like me, they’d spent a few hours after work with friends, maybe even on a date, and now they were going home. Alone. On a Friday at ten-thirty. To open their mail, checkout cable, root around in the refrigerator, flip through a Vogue, fantasize about promotions, boyfriends, marriage proposals and be depressed until sleep thankfully took over. One of the Me’s caught me staring, so I shot my gaze upward to an advertisement for a local podiatrist.
    â€œSo tell me more about her,” Eloise said as the train rumbled uptown.
    â€œThe Gnat?”
    Eloise nodded. “Is she a total diva? All fabulous and tragically hip?”
    I envisioned Natasha. “Yes and no. She is sort of ‘super-fabulous’ in the way you mean, but there’s something I can’t put my finger on about her. I don’t have her figured out yet.”
    â€œYou will, though. You’re gonna know her inside and out after working with her on the memoir. Why is she going to Dana’s wedding, anyway?”
    I shrugged. Yeah, why?
    Eloise was flung against me as the train short-stopped in the 42rd Street station. “Maybe she wants the free booze. Does she still have a drinking problem?”
    â€œNot according to her book outline,” I said. “And she didn’t have any alcohol at lunch.” Which, by the way, had come in just under eighty-five bucks. Maybe I could treat myself to a fifteen-dollar pan-seared salmon tomorrow night. That was practically a cure for Another Saturday Night Alone Syndrome. Even if you had to eat the salmon alone while renting a