We sipped cocktails and flirted, and as the evening wore on, Jack and his crew wanted to find a livelier venue (proving my theory that the number of times you change bars is inversely proportional to your age). So we all piled into cabs to find some party in SoHo. But, also in youthful fashion, Jack and his boys turned out to have the wrong address and then the wrong cell phone number of the friend of the friend having the party. They did the whole inept routine where they blame each other: Dude! I can’t believe you lost the shit, etc. We ended up standing on Prince Street, in the cold, ready to call it a night. Rachel and Claire left first, sharing a cab to the Upper East Side. Jack’s friends took off next, determined to find their party. So there Jack and I were alone on the street. I was buzzed, and Jack looked so smitten that I threw him a few harmless kisses. It was no big deal. It really wasn’t. At least it wasn’t to me.
Of course, eager little Jack called me repeatedly the next day, leaving a multitude of messages on my cell. Eventually, I phoned him back and confessed that I had a serious boyfriend, and that he couldn’t call me again. I told him I was sorry.
“I understand,” he said, sounding crushed. “Your boyfriend is a lucky guy…. If you ever break up with him, give me a call.”
He gave me his work, home, and cell number, and I absentmindedly scribbled them on the back of a Chinese take-out menu that I ended up tossing later that night.
“Okay. Great. Thanks, Jack. And sorry again.”
As I hung up, I felt a twinge of guilt and wondered why I had kissed Jack in the first place. There hadn’t been much of a point. Even in my buzzed state, I had no delusions of real interest. The only thing that went into the calculation was, “Do I want to, at this moment, kiss this boy or not?” and because the answer was yes, I did it. I don’t know. Maybe I was bored. Maybe I just missed the early days when Dex seemed to be crazy about me. I fleetingly worried that the thing with Jack was evidence of a problem in our relationship, but then I figured that a kiss was just a kiss. No big deal. I didn’t even bother telling Rachel about Jack. It was over—there was no point in watching her mount her high horse as she had done when I cheated on my high school and college boyfriends.
After Jack, I was the portrait of the ideal girlfriend for a long stretch, close to a year. But then I met Lair at a launch party thrown by our PR firm for a new line of hip sportswear called Emmeline. Lair was a gorgeous model from South Africa with caramel-colored skin and eyes so blue they nearly matched the aqua sweatsuit he was wearing.
After he smiled at me twice, I approached him. “So, I have to know,” I shouted over the music, “are those fake?”
“What?”
“Your eyes. Are you wearing blue lenses?”
He laughed a melodic South African laugh. “Jeepers, no. They’re mine.”
“Did you just say jeepers?”
He nodded and smiled.
“How quaint.” I studied the edges of his corneas just to be sure he was telling the truth. Sure enough, no telltale contact lens lines. He laughed, exposing gorgeous white teeth. Then he extended his hand. “I’m Lair.”
“Leah?” I said, sliding my hand into his strong, warm one.
“Lair,” he said again, still sounding like Leah. “You know, liar with the a and i inverted, right?”
“Oh, Lair. What a cozy name,” I said, picturing us both curled up in a little hideaway together. “I’m Darcy.”
“Pleasure, Darcy,” he said, and then glanced around the party that I had been planning for months. “This is quite an event.”
“Thanks,” I said proudly. Then I threw out some PR jargon. Something about what a challenge it is to make a client a real standout in today’s competitive marketplace.
He nodded then bobbed his head to the bass.
“But…” I laughed, giving my long, dark hair a seductive toss. “It’s a lot of fun too. I get to meet great people like you.”
We kept talking, interrupted at regular intervals by my colleagues and other guests. Fellow model Kimmy, who was wearing pink fleece sweatpants with a navy 69 across her butt and a matching 69 jog bra, sought out Lair repeatedly and snapped pictures of him with her digital camera.
“Smile, honey,” she’d say, as I did my best to squeeze into her photos. But despite Kimmy’s overtures, Lair never diverted his attention, and our flirting evolved into more serious conversation. We talked about his home in South Africa. I admitted that I knew nothing about his country except that it used to have apartheid before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. As Lair explained more about South African politics, the problem with crime in his hometown of Johannesburg, and the amazing beauty of Kruger National Park, I realized that he was more than just a pretty face. He told me that he was only modeling to pay for school, even tossing out the word sartorial.
After the party, Lair and I hopped in a cab together. My intentions were basically pure—I wanted only a kiss on the street, Jack-style. But then Lair whispered in my ear, “Darcy, would you possibly consider joining me back at my hotel?” And I just couldn’t help myself. So I went to The Palace with him, convinced that we would only engage in some heavy-duty making out.
And that is pretty much all we did. Then around three in the morning, I stood, dressed, and told him that I really needed to get home. Technically, I could have stayed, as Dex was out of town on a business trip, but somehow falling asleep with a guy made it seem like real cheating. And to that point, I felt that I wasn’t a full-fledged cheater. Although in truth I think the threshold test of whether you have cheated is rather clear: if your partner could see a video of the event, would he or she think you had cheated? An alternative test is: if you could see a video of your partner in the identical situation, would you think he or she had cheated? On both counts, I clearly failed. But I had not crossed that bright sex line, and this fact made me proud.
I left a pining Lair that night, and after a few weeks of hot and heavy e-mailing, we gradually stopped talking and then lost touch altogether. The evening started to fade in my mind—and I nearly forgot those incredible eyes until I spotted him, in white boxer shorts, smiling down at me from a billboard in the middle of Times Square. I conjured the details of our tryst, wondering what would have happened if I had broken up with Dex for Lair. I pictured us living in Johannesburg amid elephants and carjackers, and decided, once again, that our relationship was best left at The Palace.
Dex and I got engaged a few months later, and I vowed to myself that I would be true to him forever. So we didn’t have a ton in common, and he didn’t thrill me every minute. He was still an amazing catch and a good guy to boot. I was going to marry him and live happily ever after on the Upper West Side. Okay, maybe we’d eventually move to Fifth Avenue, but other than such minor tweaking, my life was scripted.
I just hadn’t planned on Marcus.
Four
For years, I knew Marcus only as Dexter’s slacker freshman roommate from Georgetown. While Marcus finished next to last in the class and got stoned all the time, Dex graduated summa and had never tried an illegal drug. But the freshman-roommate experience can be a powerful one, so the two stayed close throughout college and afterward, even though they lived on opposite coasts.
Of course, I never gave his college pal much thought until Dex and I got engaged and his name was thrown out as a groomsman candidate. Dex only had four clear-cut picks, but I had five bridesmaids (including Rachel as maid of honor), and symmetry in the wedding party lineup wasn’t a negotiable point. So Dex phoned Marcus and bestowed the honor upon him. After the two yucked it up for a while, Marcus asked to speak to me, which I thought was good form, especially given the fact that we had never met face-to-face. He gave me the standard congratulations with some other remark about promising not to get the groom loaded the night before the wedding. I laughed and told him that I was holding him to that, never imagining that what he should have been promising was not to sleep with me before our wedding.
In fact, I didn’t expect to see him
at all before the wedding, but a few weeks later he took a new job in Manhattan. To celebrate, I made reservations at Aureole, despite Dexter’s insistence that Marcus wasn’t a fancy guy.
Dex and I arrived at the restaurant first and waited at the bar for Marcus. He finally walked in sporting baggy jeans, a wrinkled shirt, and at least two days’ growth of beard. In short, he wasn’t the kind of guy I usually look at twice.
“Dex-ter!” Marcus shouted as he approached us and then gave Dex a hearty, man-style hug, clapping him on the back. “Good to see you, man,” Marcus said.
“You too,” Dex said, gesturing at me with a gentlemanly sweep of his hand. “This is Darcy.”
I stood slowly and leaned in to kiss the fifth groomsman on his whiskered cheek.
Marcus grinned. “The infamous Darcy.”
I liked being called “infamous”—despite its negative connotations—so I laughed, put my hand to my chest, and said, “None of it’s true.”
“Too bad,” Marcus said under his breath, and then pointed to the statuesque redhead hovering beside him. “Oh. This is my friend Stacy. We used to work together.”
I had seen the woman come in at the same time as Marcus, but hadn’t thought they were together. Nothing about them matched. Stacy was a total fashion plate, wearing a cropped teal leather jacket and a sweet pair of lizard pumps. As we were led to our table, I shot Dex a dirty look, irritated at him for suggesting that I might want to “tone it down” when I had busted out with my Louis Vuitton white cape and red tartan taffeta bustier. So now I was stuck in an understated black-and-white tweed jacket next to splashy Stacy. I assessed her again, wondering if she was prettier than I was. I quickly decided that I was more beautiful, but she was taller, which annoyed me. I liked being both. Incidentally, I had always believed that every woman wanted to be the most attractive in any group, but once when I admitted my feelings to Rachel, she gave me this blank stare followed by a diplomatic nod. At which point I backtracked somewhat and said, “Well, unless I’m friends with her and then I don’t compare.”
Fortunately, Stacy’s personality wasn’t nearly as scintillating as her wardrobe, and I succeeded handily in outshining her. Marcus was extremely entertaining, too, and kept our table in stitches. He wasn’t an outright jokester, but was full of wry observations about the restaurant, the fancy food, and the people around us. I noticed that whenever Stacy laughed at him, she’d touch his arm in a familiar way, which made me fairly certain that if they weren’t dating, they had at least hooked up. By the end of the night, I reevaluated Marcus’s looks, upgrading him several notches. It was a combination of Stacy’s obvious interest in him, his sense of humor, and something else. Something was just sexy about him: a gleam in his brown eyes and the cleft in his chin, which made me think of Danny Zuko in Grease (that first beach scene in the movie was my idea of romance for years).
After dinner, as Dex and I were cabbing back to the Upper West, I said, “I like Marcus. He’s really funny and has surprising sex appeal.”
Dex had grown accustomed to my candid commentary on other men, so it no longer fazed him. He just said, “Yeah. He’s a character, all right.”
I waited for him to say that he could tell Marcus approved of me as well, and when he didn’t, I prompted, “What did Marcus say to you at the end of the night when you were getting our coats? Did he say something about me?”
Stacy and I had been chatting a few feet away and I had figured that Marcus was saying something like “You got yourself a hell of a woman” or “She’s way hotter than your college girlfriend” or even a nice, straightforward “I really like Darcy—she’s great.”
But after I pressed Dex at length, he told me that what Marcus had shared was that he and Stacy had been dating, and despite the fact that she gave “bombass blow jobs,” he was ending things because she was too demanding. Needless to say, the fact that Marcus garnered blow jobs from a girl like Stacy made him rise even more notches in my book of judgments.
And the more Dex and I hung out with Marcus, the more I liked him. But I still didn’t think of him as anything other than Dexter’s friend and a groomsman in our wedding until a few months later, the night of Rachel’s thirtieth birthday, when I threw a surprise party for her at Prohibition, our favorite bar on the Upper West Side. I remember sometime that evening sidling up to Marcus and telling him that he may have been the party boy back in college, but that I could drink him under the table now.
He smirked and slapped the bar and said, “Oh, yeah? Bring it, big talker.”
We proceeded to do Jägermeister shots. It was quite a bonding experience, not only because we were drinking together but because we hid the shots from Dex, who hates it when I get wasted. It’s unbecoming. It’s immature. It’s unhealthy. It’s dangerous, he would lecture. Not that it ever stopped me, especially not on that night. At one point, before our final round of shots, Dex found us at the bar and looked at me suspiciously. “Are you doing shots?” he asked, glancing at the empty shot glasses on the bar in front of us.
“That wasn’t mine,” I said. “Those were Marcus’s. He did two.”
“Yeah, man. Those were mine,” Marcus said, twinkly eyed.
As Dex walked away, with raised eyebrows, Marcus winked at me. I laughed. “He can be so uptight. Thanks for the cover.”
“No problem,” Marcus said.
As of that moment, we had a secret, and having a secret—even a little one—creates a bond between two people. I remember thinking to myself how much more fun he was than Dex, who never lost control. On top of the fun factor, Marcus was looking hot that evening. He was wearing a navy polo shirt—nothing special—but for once it wasn’t totally baggy so I could tell he had a pretty nice body. As I sipped a martini, I asked him if he worked out, which is a flirtatious question at best, downright cheesy at worst, but I didn’t care. I wanted to go there.
“Once or twice,” he said.
“C’mon. You have a great body. Do you lift? Run?”
He said only if he’s being chased. He then proceeded to tell me that he had gone running with a girl the other day, despite his better judgment. “I never should have gone,” he said, rubbing his thighs. “I’m still paying for it. And the date went nowhere.”
“Was this with Stacy?”
“Who?”
“Stacy. You know, the redhead that you brought to Aureole?”
“Oh! That Stacy. Ancient history.”
“Good,” I said. “I wasn’t a big fan. She was a bore.”
Marcus laughed. “She wasn’t your brightest bulb.”
“So then, who was your jogger girl?” I asked.
“Just this chick.”
“Does this chick have a name?”
“Let’s call her Wanda.”
“Okay. Wanda…. So did Wanda give you blow jobs as good as Stacy’s?” I asked, proud of my outrageousness.
He smirked, poised for a comeback, but at this point, Dex and Rachel both joined us and I never got my answer, only a sexy little wink. I remember thinking that I wished I could show him my talents in that arena. Not that I really wanted to go down on a groomsman in my wedding party—it was just one of those fleeting thoughts of alcohol-induced attraction.
Sometime after that, my memories of the night end, except for a vague recollection of Dex ushering me out of the bar and an even vaguer memory of puking in a paper bag beside our bed.
I didn’t think of Marcus for a couple of days after that, until he called to talk to Dex. I told him Dex was still at work, feeling happy for the opportunity to talk to Marcus.
“He works too much,” Marcus said.
“Tell me about it…. So how’s it going? What’s new? Think you stayed out late enough the other night?” I asked. After taking me home, Dex had gone back out with Marcus and they had ended up staying out that night until nearly seven in the morning.
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that,” he said.
“Did you stay out of trouble?”
“Y
eah.”
“So you didn’t talk to any girls?” I asked.
He laughed. “You know I always talk to the ladies.”
I recalled that moment at the bar, my unmistakable attraction to him. “Oh. I know,” I said flirtatiously. “So how is Wanda anyway?”
“Wanda?”
“You know. Wanda. The jogger.”
“Oh, that Wanda! Right. It didn’t work out with Wanda…. But I was wondering…”
“Wondering what?” I asked coyly, sensing that he was poised to flirt back with me.
But instead he asked, “What is the deal with Rachel?”
I was stunned to hear him say her name. “What do you mean?”
“Is she dating anyone?”
“No. Why?” I asked, feeling irrationally territorial and a little bit jealous that Marcus was interested in my friend. Perhaps, on some level, I even wished that he were pining after me. It was selfish, given the fact that Rachel was single and I was engaged. But you can’t help your feelings.
Marcus continued, “She’s pretty hot in that studious way of hers.”
“Yeah, she’s a cute girl,” I said, thinking it was weird to hear her described as hot, although I had recently noticed that she seemed to be improving from our school days and early twenties. I think it was her skin. She didn’t have as many lines around her eyes as other girls our age. And on a good day, when she put a little effort into her appearance, you might even call her pretty. But hot was going too far. “Well, if you want to go out with my friend, you have to go through me,” I said jokingly, but actually meaning it. I was going to play gatekeeper on this one for sure.
“Fine…. Tell her I’m gonna ask her out. And tell her she’d better say yes. Or else.”