isn’t particularly good-looking either—Tom is the equivalent, I’d say, of a subtly patterned beige couch.)
Anyway: Henry. At some point, and I don’t know exactly when it happened, the conversation turned, and Henry and I were no longer two coworkers talking about careers and apartments, but a man and a woman, slightly drunk, in a Chinese restaurant with a candle in the middle of the table. Actually, I do know when it happened. Henry had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and when he came back he had to kind of squeeze behind my chair to get back into his, and in the process of squeezing by he leaned down and said, “You smell good.” That’s it, just “You smell good,” but all of a sudden we were laughing a little more conspiratorially and touching each other’s forearms to punctuate our sentences and casually mentioning movies we’d like to see and then agreeing that we ought to go see them together.
“Won’t that be a problem for, what’s his name, the guy in your column?” Henry said.
“We broke up,” I said.
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Well,” I said. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
And so I told Henry what had happened with Tom, but I left out the more humiliating details, and the truth is there wasn’t much of a story left without the humiliating details. I said that Tom and I wanted different things, for example, but I didn’t indicate that what I wanted was Tom and what Tom wanted was Kate Pearce. And while I didn’t exactly lie, it’s safe to say that by the time I was through, Henry was left with the impression that Tom and I had sat down together one day and decided that our relationship, while wonderful, had run its course; that we’d arrived at this decision in a supremely rational and healthy manner, without the aid of sex with third parties or marital ultimatums or anything like that; and that we’d both walked away with no hurt feelings, only a little bit of self-knowledge and a twinge of fond regret. Even worse, though, I managed to imply that all of this had happened quite some time ago, and that I’d had a chance to gain perspective and—I’m ashamed to admit it, but I actually used this word—
closure.
“Have you ever noticed that the Chinese don’t have a good dessert?” Henry said when the check finally came.
“What do you mean?”
“Think about how much more money people would spend in Chinese restaurants each year if they had a halfway-decent dessert. They should just adopt something. Just, pretend it’s theirs and start serving it.”
“Tiramisu,” I said.
“Perfect. It even sounds Chinese.”
“Pretty soon people would be saying, ‘I’m in the mood for tiramisu, let’s get Chinese.’”
“You know what?” Henry said.
“What?”
“I’m in the mood for tiramisu.”
So we paid the check and we walked to an Italian restaurant a few blocks away and sat at the bar and shared a tiramisu and some sambuca, and Henry told me about growing up in Florida and I told him about growing up in Arizona, and what with all the alcohol it started to feel like we had a lot in common, citrus fruit playing a prominent role in both of our childhoods, the disorienting absence of seasons, the longing for a life with snow days and fireflies and art museums displaying more than just shards of Native American pottery. I could end up having sex here, I thought. This is how people do it. They go out, they get drunk, they talk, one of them says that the other one smells good, and then they go home and have sex. Of course, here we had the added complication that Henry was my boss, but that sort of thing has been known to happen. Maybe not to me, but it happens. Did I want to be the kind of girl who has undefined-yet-presumably-meaningless sex with her boss? Could I be that girl? Was it even possible? Could I be the kind of girl who has undefined-yet-presumably-meaningless sex with her boss and regrets it the next morning but still wouldn’t do anything different if she had
Anyway: Henry. At some point, and I don’t know exactly when it happened, the conversation turned, and Henry and I were no longer two coworkers talking about careers and apartments, but a man and a woman, slightly drunk, in a Chinese restaurant with a candle in the middle of the table. Actually, I do know when it happened. Henry had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and when he came back he had to kind of squeeze behind my chair to get back into his, and in the process of squeezing by he leaned down and said, “You smell good.” That’s it, just “You smell good,” but all of a sudden we were laughing a little more conspiratorially and touching each other’s forearms to punctuate our sentences and casually mentioning movies we’d like to see and then agreeing that we ought to go see them together.
“Won’t that be a problem for, what’s his name, the guy in your column?” Henry said.
“We broke up,” I said.
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Well,” I said. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
And so I told Henry what had happened with Tom, but I left out the more humiliating details, and the truth is there wasn’t much of a story left without the humiliating details. I said that Tom and I wanted different things, for example, but I didn’t indicate that what I wanted was Tom and what Tom wanted was Kate Pearce. And while I didn’t exactly lie, it’s safe to say that by the time I was through, Henry was left with the impression that Tom and I had sat down together one day and decided that our relationship, while wonderful, had run its course; that we’d arrived at this decision in a supremely rational and healthy manner, without the aid of sex with third parties or marital ultimatums or anything like that; and that we’d both walked away with no hurt feelings, only a little bit of self-knowledge and a twinge of fond regret. Even worse, though, I managed to imply that all of this had happened quite some time ago, and that I’d had a chance to gain perspective and—I’m ashamed to admit it, but I actually used this word—
closure.
“Have you ever noticed that the Chinese don’t have a good dessert?” Henry said when the check finally came.
“What do you mean?”
“Think about how much more money people would spend in Chinese restaurants each year if they had a halfway-decent dessert. They should just adopt something. Just, pretend it’s theirs and start serving it.”
“Tiramisu,” I said.
“Perfect. It even sounds Chinese.”
“Pretty soon people would be saying, ‘I’m in the mood for tiramisu, let’s get Chinese.’”
“You know what?” Henry said.
“What?”
“I’m in the mood for tiramisu.”
So we paid the check and we walked to an Italian restaurant a few blocks away and sat at the bar and shared a tiramisu and some sambuca, and Henry told me about growing up in Florida and I told him about growing up in Arizona, and what with all the alcohol it started to feel like we had a lot in common, citrus fruit playing a prominent role in both of our childhoods, the disorienting absence of seasons, the longing for a life with snow days and fireflies and art museums displaying more than just shards of Native American pottery. I could end up having sex here, I thought. This is how people do it. They go out, they get drunk, they talk, one of them says that the other one smells good, and then they go home and have sex. Of course, here we had the added complication that Henry was my boss, but that sort of thing has been known to happen. Maybe not to me, but it happens. Did I want to be the kind of girl who has undefined-yet-presumably-meaningless sex with her boss? Could I be that girl? Was it even possible? Could I be the kind of girl who has undefined-yet-presumably-meaningless sex with her boss and regrets it the next morning but still wouldn’t do anything different if she had
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