How Did You Get This Number Read online

  I knew I was in trouble the minute I opened the door. He sat at the end of the bar performing a series of unremarkable actions: reading a magazine, chatting with the bartender, unsticking a cocktail napkin from the bottom of a whiskey glass. If I may confirm your suspicions: things will not end pleasantly with this person. I understand that this is the point at which I’m meant to provide some salient physical details particular to Ben and Ben alone. That way, when this situation turns sour, it’s clear I had something to cry over. But perhaps we can strike some sort of deal in which you pretend I have told you all the things you need to hear so that you might sufficiently mourn along with me. Because it’s not for lack of desire that I withhold these finer points. It’s that sometimes I think I will never be able to conjure his face again. I can get the eyes and the mouth if I try, but the nose could be anyone’s nose. Same with the forehead. Kind of blurred into deformity. The mind is like any other organ—it will be kind and healthy to you if you are kind and healthy to it—so when I consciously stopped thinking about Ben, my mind took over the heavy lifting for me. Are you ready to go back to Titanic? Sure, fine, what the hell. Bring me a glass of something and roll the footage. I am ready. But not able. My Ben memories have fallen victim to a kind of Russian-nesting-doll effect in which a person becomes smaller and more poorly rendered with each layer. The more buried the romance, the less surface area there is to work with. The strokes become sloppy.

  Plus, as it is with every set of nesting dolls, no matter how many or how few, there is always that one at the center that won’t open.

  “What are you reading?” I picked up his magazine.

  “It’s not The Atlantic Monthly,” said face-blurred Ben.

  I held it up and flipped to the cover.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It’s a ploy to get me out of talking to the bartender about the medical coverage for his prostate surgery.”

  I looked over to see the bartender examining the mirror behind the liquor bottles, picking something out of his teeth with one of those drink stirrers they put holes in to trick you into thinking they’re straws. He looked over at us and waved with the stirrer, a little pole with no flag.

  “You’d think just the surgery would be sufficiently inappropriate.” I nodded back at the bartender.

  “Turns out”—Ben shook his head—“he used to work for The Atlantic Monthly.”

  “Ahh, that is unfortunate. You should’ve gone with Cat Fancy.”

  “Well, now I don’t need it.” He tucked the magazine into his back pocket. “Now I have you.”

  I was hoping to skip a process I had seen too many coworkers go through. All arts industries are abnormally incestuous, and book publishing is no exception. Not only do you have the quantity of time spent working together but the quality of spare-time interests. Which can make going to work as painful as an exposed nerve if you don’t like the people you work with. These people are not just asking you to attend meetings, they’re infringing on your mind. Although some demands on your time can make you see soul mates in your coworkers if you do like them. These are your desert-island people. You got into this game not because you were particularly skilled at the same things but because you liked the same things. You spend every meal with them. You call one another at night and swap work dreams in the morning. How do we first begin to covet, Clarice?

  Imagine the degree of romantic delusion festering in these artfully dressed youths, thinking they have finally found their tribe... well. People are bound to get naked eventually.

  Of course, down the road, everyone revolts. They want off the island. They’ll happily sleep with anyone who has never heard of their latest packaged cultural progeny, who becomes conscious of a new artist for the first time when they read about him in a magazine. How refreshing! An engineer, a teacher, a doctor. Bring it! A chef, a banker, a pencil maker. No, scratch the pencil maker. Too close to home. But now what? Now the real danger begins. We grow frustrated with these down-to-earth partners and their irksome normality. We seek the ease of shorthand and grieve for the comfort of synchronized priorities—a relationship in which no one will ever say to the other, “What are you so stressed about? It’s not world hunger.” In a cycle that’s not vicious but stale, we return to what we know best, shutting ourselves off for good and never leaving our immediate radius again. It’s like No Exit with a better soundtrack and a kick-ass library.

  “I’m sorry I’m late.” I dragged out a stool. And here I lied: the eyes I can remember. A dirty peridot color. Gleaming with the devil’s presence. Or perhaps contacts.

  “Here.” He reached for my bag with one hand and felt for hooks beneath the bar with the other.

  As we talked, I realized there was one other tiny little hiccup. Ben had a girlfriend. I couldn’t remember how I knew this, but know it I did. He had not informed me of said girlfriend, not mentioned her once, but it was one of those relationships with a duration that qualifies for common-law marriage. They owned parakeets. They had seen each other’s passport photos. They split the electric bill. These facts seeped into my mind through tribal osmosis. I thought perhaps I was making the tension up, anyway. I was superimposing my attraction, creeping out into the road and painting an extra lane for traffic to flow in the opposite direction. But four rounds later, I had entered a bad country song. Literally. It was the jukebox’s genre of choice. We drank whiskey through mixer sticks until we were the only ones there. Ben touched my knee and left his hand there, ready to blame the carelessness of his extremities on alcohol. I didn’t move it. Eventually, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I leaned on the sink, looked seriously at the mirror, and slapped myself in the face.

  Dolly Parton’s “Stay Out of My Bedroom” was playing outside. I thought, as many have thought before me: what would Dolly do? I once saw an interview with Dolly in which she described being a young girl, biting her lips and pinching her cheeks before dates because she wasn’t allowed to use makeup. There was only one thing to do. I slapped the other side of my face to even things out.

  “Should we go?”

  While I was bursting blood vessels in the toilet, the bartender had placed the stools on top of tables in an inhospitable position.

  “I guess we should,” Ben said, looking at me without blinking.

  “Awesome.” I took out my wallet. In the course of my opening it and his insisting I shut it, Daryl’s card came tumbling out onto the bar.

  “You dropped this.” He unfolded it. “Should I be jealous?”

  “Oh, God.” I snatched it back. “I need that in case he doesn’t show.”

  “In case who doesn’t show?”

  I told him about Daryl and the rug and the pit stains. I told him about my new apartment, which would lead to my new life and how we are drawn to things we can’t afford and people call it “taste” to make it palatable but what it really is is a kind of superficial cloying for happiness. But I was young and in my prime cloying years, so this was okay. And instead of telling me it was morally wrong and moderately illegal, he kissed me.

  THE NEXT DAY, FRESH FROM THE ATM, I WAITED on a bustling Midtown street corner near my office. Daryl pulled up in a black Kia with gleaming rims and rolled down a magenta-tinted window. People stared. I leaned in, trying to push the actual documentary Pimps Up, Hos Down: Hookers at the Point to the further recesses of my mind. I made small talk about where he had come from, the fact that he owned a car. I couldn’t tell where the parameters of the conversation should be, and was impressed by all cars. Even ones with naked-lady air-fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. How humiliating for her, I thought. To be stripped naked, back arched, and for what? Her home still stank of feet and cologne. I reached over through the passenger window and flicked her, sending her spinning.

  Daryl handed me a sticker with a bar code on it.

  “There could be a bunch of bananas headed my way, couldn’t there? Please don’t send me three hundred fifty dollars’ worth of bananas. Or any bananas
at all.”

  I couldn’t let go of the envelope of cash. The magenta tint was peeling from the edge of the window like skin.

  “Well, Solange.” Daryl slung his forearm over the steering wheel. “Life is like a box of chocolates.”

  “Sloane ...” I mumbled. “And I know. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

  “No, man. Shit’s picked over, and it makes your ass fat.”

  “That’s pretty funny,” I said as I released the money.

  Apparently, you don’t need a gun to rob me. Just get me into a dark alley and tell me a decent joke.

  Two days later a giant padded roll appeared outside my front door. Another tenant must have dragged it in. It leaned against my door frame, where it slumped, imposing but lazy, like an off-duty guard. I kicked it into my apartment. When I cut the strings to unfurl it, the carpet revealed what I already knew in my heart to be true. The fresh-off-the-loom scent wafted through the air. I checked the packing label to confirm it had been shipped not from an outlet in Greenwich but directly from the company’s factory in Queens. This was a brand-new carpet. You could eat off it. Though you wouldn’t dare.

  “Yo. Solange. Did you get the carpet?”

  Ever the service-oriented thief, Daryl called to check on his delivery. I would soon learn that calls from Daryl originated from a different number every time, a habit that seemed spylike in theory but massively inconvenient in reality. Who keeps so many phones? Who borrows so many? And why? His identity-masking also had the inverse effect, though I didn’t have the heart to tell him. Daryl—along with my parents, who still block their home number for privacy—was my perpetual Unknown Number. Like blank tiles in Scrabble. Yes, they can be any letter you wish, but in the end there are only two tiles. It’s the telecommunication equivalent of pissing in a pool that turns your urine blue.

  “Yes, Daryl.” I sat in the middle of my mat of shame. “It’s in great shape for a sample.”

  Daryl knew that I knew that he knew that I knew that this thing had come off the back of a truck. But I wanted it out there, on the record for both of us, that I was not consciously participating in the black-market transfer of luxury home furnishings. Let the record show that while I may not have been innocent, I spoke the speech of an innocent person.

  “Well”—he smirked through the phone—“there’s not a lot of foot traffic in the store where it came from.”

  Apparently, he wanted the same thing. And apparently, carpets were not the only “display” items available courtesy of Daryl’s warehouse on wheels. Why, just in were a shipment of hand-blown drawer pulls that may or may not have been damaged in transit. Was I interested? Reader, I was. Daryl and I had wisely thrown ourselves into the deep end with the carpet transaction. If the retail value of such a big-ticket item had made it past my thin moral filter, I had no business flinching at some lousy drawer pulls. It was a gateway carpet. So we agreed to meet in Union Square, where I would again come bearing a wad of cash, though slightly less thick than last time. In return, Daryl would send me a package of possibly chipped cabinet handles and drawer pulls from the outlet in Greenwich.

  My money was on unchipped.

  BEN HAD CALLED EVERY DAY FOR FOUR DAYS, HIS messages packed with charming jokes about the anthropomorphic nature of his relationship with my voice mail. I programmed his name into my phone without a last name. My phone-programming policy runs backward: if I barely know you, you go by your first name, and preferably an abbreviated version of that. Once we’ve been trapped in a bomb shelter together, forced to repopulate the human race as we know it, you get a last name. On the fifth day, I picked up.

  “I thought you had a girlfriend.”

  “I would like to see you again.”

  “I’m sensing that. But you know,” I whispered hostilely,

  “if I were a girl and called some guy every day for four days, I would be having what we like to refer to as ‘a psychotic break.’ ”

  “You are a girl.”

  “I’m trying to point out a double standard here.”

  “But when I do it?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Rather, I knew what to say, and it wasn’t English. Whatever sound a cell phone snapping shut makes was the only appropriate one.

  “Meet me in Union Square after work,” he said, tentatively authoritative. “We’ll get coffee. If it makes you feel better, I’ll let you pay.”

  “I do have to be there this afternoon, anyway.”

  We sat on a park bench, Ben and I, with a metal armrest strategically between us. It was the start of fall, that time of year when everyone walks around New York declaring how hot it is for this time of year. It hasn’t been cold cold in September in twenty years, and yet every year we are shocked. The emergence of roasted-nut vendors on the sidewalk and colored leaves in the elementary school windows won’t stop you from sweating. Unless you put more thought into it than is normal, you end up wearing outfits that do not say “fashionable” so much as they say “uncle.” And so I sat in my temporally schizophrenic linen dress and tall leather boots. I shoved the dress material under my knees to keep the wind away as Ben explained that tribal osmosis never lies.

  He did, in fact, have a long-term girlfriend. Until recently. They were broken up. The pain was fresh. It was raw. It was grade D but edible. Her name was Lauren, and she designed retro underwear. He had moved out of their apartment, granting her sole custody of the birds and the phone bill, and was subletting a place nearby. Actually, he could point to his new bedroom window from where we sat, and did so. Something about seeing the window turned me puritanical. Probably because I knew how inevitable it was that I would soon see this bench from the other side. I looked at the ground.

  Ben and this woman had been dating for longer than I’d owned anything I was wearing, including my breasts. I had questions. Questions delivered to my brain in bunches, tied with ribbons of anxiety. Where were his things? Who broke up with whom? Were they on speaking terms? If she was his in-case-of-emergency person and he was hit by a bus but lived, they’d probably get back together, right? The worst terrorist attack in American history was recent enough, and it had taught us that disasters make you appreciate what you already have, not what you barely know. But I felt I couldn’t afford to gamble on the answers. The truth was, I was elated by this information. I adored this information in all its validating glory. But I also worried about the fragility of it. Purty rabbit. Crack! Dead. And so I asked nothing. Ben leaned over the cold armrest and held my hand. I pulled it back.

  “I have a meeting.” I got up, glancing at the rubber band around my wrist where a watch might go.

  “After what I just told you? Are you serious?”

  “Yes. As a heart attack.”

  “Can you maybe pick something equally serious but less medical?”

  “As an eight-year relationship?”

  Really, I just didn’t want him laying eyes on Daryl. How would I explain the suspect majesty that was Daryl? Clearly the idea of him, the card with his phone number, held its appeal. But the real-life physicality of Daryl had a darkness to it, a seedy underbelly that was more like an all-over-belly. Daryl in person was not my edgy connection to low-grade illegal activity but an inmate-looking person, stuffed into his clothes like they were sausage skin. No one likes to see how the sausage gets made. So I leaned down and kissed Ben and told him to call me. I’d even pick up this time.

  I remember the salty-sweet combination of excitement and relief we both felt. Excitement at the start of a new love affair and relief that we had found each other despite the anti-incestuousness policy we had. Beyond that was the special relief we both reserved for him: he had narrowly escaped a scrape in which he would be with the wrong woman for the rest of his life. Like the man said the night we met: Now I have you. I actually preferred it when all of this was unspoken. It was when he spoke of it, outlined his feelings with such intensity and detail, that I should have been more concerned. But how can you be concerned with t
hose eyes? How can you be concerned when a man who lives clear across town is waiting on your stoop as you leave for work in the morning, surprising you with coffee? When you describe a movie you saw when you were so little you think maybe you dreamed it and so he tracks down a copy of it? How can you be concerned when you see that twinkle in his family’s and friends’ eyes that says, Thank God, you are nothing like her? Or when you come out of the bathroom on a Sunday morning, looking like you’ve been hit by the nightlife truck, and he says, “I wake up every morning wanting to see you”? Then he shakes his head at the girlishness of his own confession and invites you to some family event many months from now.

  These incidents are not cause for concern. They are cause to program his last name into your phone.

  SOME PEOPLE HAVE COKE GUYS. I HAD AN UPHOLSTERY guy. As the months rolled by, my acquisitions from Daryl could be parsed into two major categories. The first was home goods. Dishes, trivets, a lamp, a doorknob, and a throw pillow you’d sooner shield from an atomic bomb than throw anywhere. All well out of my price range and all packed like cattle into my new studio. I was a fence. A really, really nicely decorated fence. With only the faintest twinges of guilt, I accepted compliments from friends on my new goods. My mother came to visit and commented on how savvy I was, stretching my publishing-house salary to support these furnishings. The nicer my belongings became, the more the savvy transferred back her way, a personal compliment to her frugal-purchase-imbuing parenting skills. This is the good thing about furniture. As opposed to precious jewelry, no one is ever quite sure how much it costs. No one will believe you found an emerald ring in a nest of diamonds in a cereal box, but there are people in this world lucky enough to find original Eames chairs at flea markets. I just wasn’t one of them.