“What if he’s it?” I teased. “What if he’s the one?”
“Then I’ll let him have you,” Jay said, assuming an expression of noble resignation as he spread out his New York Times. “Far be it from me to thwart true love’s course.”
“Did you say ‘thwart’?”
“I did,” he said, nodding. “I thwarted.”
I smiled, ordered a glass of wine from the waitress, and said, “Amy tells me you’re an editor.”
He shook his head. “An editor no more.”
“You gave up on urban farming?”
“There’s only so much you can say about how to get around the zoning laws so that you can keep rabbits in Red Hook. So I’ve gone slinking back to the law.”
I fake-applauded. He mock-bowed. “I’m actually an adjunct criminal law professor at NYU. I thought you should know, in case Amy told you all about how I dug latrines in Sierra Leone and you were looking for some kind of Mellors-the-gamekeeper thing.”
I smiled and looked away, wondering how he’d known that was exactly what I’d been imagining, and how he knew I’d read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I’d discovered in my parents’ bookcase, between What Color Is Your Parachute? and a Passover cookbook titled Let My People Eat. It would be nice to date a reader. Andy’s shelves had featured guides to running, biographies of runners, memoirs by runners, and not one but two copies of Once a Runner.
Two white wines and several literary references later, it was time for me to go. Jay stood, walked me out, then said, “Hope to see you soon.” I went to a newsstand, bought a tabloid, read half of it in a Starbucks, and then, trying to manage my expectations and prepare for the worst, I went back to the bar.
Jay was reading the Metro section. “No good?” he asked. He looked like he was glad to see me. I found that I was glad to see him.
“I’m starving,” I said, and he stood and took my hand, then gave my cheek a kiss.
“Then let’s eat.”
Over grilled cheese, I learned that Jay was thirty-four, the oldest of three, with a brother in banking and a sister in grad school. His mother had died of breast cancer when he was twenty-nine. His father did trust and estates law in Greenwich, and expected Jay to join the practice someday.
“Will you?”
“Probably,” he said cheerfully. “It’s not the most exciting work in the world, but the hours are usually pretty reasonable, and you’re hardly ever in court. And it’s steady. People are always going to need wills, and rich people are always going to need help figuring out how to keep their greedy kids from snatching their money.”
I answered his questions about my job, and the families I was working with, imagining what it would be like to spend time with a guy who was content and comfortable, who wasn’t constantly pushing himself, endlessly striving for something that was impossibly hard to attain.
Jay was exactly what my parents would want for me; as perfect as if they’d put him together in some kind of build-a-guy workshop. He’d gone to George Washington and spent his twenties volunteering before law school at Columbia. He’d been in two serious long-term relationships but had been single for the past year. He came from the same kind of background that I did—Jewish, but not super observant, with parents who were comfortably upper-middle-class, but not rich. His passion, he said, was Scrabble, which he played in tournaments. “You shouldn’t be too impressed,” he told me. “It’s not about being a genius. It’s more about knowing every two-letter word in the world.”
Modest, I thought. A reasonable hobby. A dry, self-deprecating sense of humor, a nice, lived-in face. I could get used to this.
On our second date—Lost in Translation at Lincoln Center and noodle soup at a new ramen place afterward—I’d told him stories of how my brother, Jonah, had been so jealous of the attention I’d gotten in the hospital that he’d once tried to feign a brain tumor so he’d get special treats, and Jay told me about his sister’s eating disorder, and how weird it had been to visit her in the hospital. “I just kept thinking, ‘Eat something! How hard can it be? Have a cheeseburger and you can come home!’ ” He rode the subway with me, even though he lived uptown, and walked me to my door. “I think you have a beautiful heart,” he said, and kissed me. His words didn’t move me as much as Andy’s once had . . . but I wasn’t sixteen anymore, and Andy was gone. I’d spent too many mornings learning that over and over again, waking up hopeful and then feeling the sadness settle into me like a sickness, as soon as I remembered what was starting to feel like the central fact of my existence: Andy is gone.