Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

party by myself and eat everything on that deli tray,
including the cigarettes?
‘Please don’t eat anything in that area,’ he says. It is
him
(bum bum BUMMM!), but I don’t yet know it’s 
him
(bum-bum-bummm). I know it’s a guy who will talk to me, he
wears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it fits him
better. He is the kind of guy who carries himself like he gets
laid a lot, a guy who likes women, a guy who would actually
fuck me properly. I would like to be fucked properly! My
dating life seems to rotate around three types of men:
preppy Ivy Leaguers who believe they’re characters in a
Fitzgerald novel; slick Wall Streeters with money signs in
their eyes, their ears, their mouths; and sensitive smart-
boys who are so self-aware that everything feels like a joke.

---

The Fitzgerald fellows tend to be ineffectively porny in bed,
a lot of noise and acrobatics to very little end. The finance
guys turn rageful and flaccid. The smart-boys fuck like
they’re composing a piece of math rock: This hand strums
around here, and then this finger offers a nice bass rhythm
… I sound quite slutty, don’t I? Pause while I count how
many … eleven. Not bad. I’ve always thought twelve was a
solid, reasonable number to end at.
‘Seriously,’ Number 12 continues. (Ha!) ‘Back away
from the tray. James has up to three other food items in his
refrigerator. I could make you an olive with mustard. Just
one olive, though.’
Just one olive, though
. It is a line that is only a little
funny, but it already has the feel of an inside joke, one that
will get funnier with nostalgic repetition. I think: 
A year from
now, we will be walking along the Brooklyn Bridge at
sunset and one of us will whisper, ‘Just one olive, though,’
and we’ll start to laugh
. (Then I catch myself. Awful. If he
knew I was doing 
a year from now
already, he’d 
run
and I’d
be obliged to cheer him on.)
Mainly, I will admit, I smile because he’s gorgeous.
Distractingly gorgeous, the kind of looks that make your
eyes pinwheel, that make you want to just address the
elephant – ‘You know you’re gorgeous, right?’ – and move
on with the conversation. I bet dudes hate him: He looks
like the rich-boy villain in an ’80s teen movie – the one who
bullies the sensitive misfit, the one who will end up with a
pie in the puss, the whipped cream wilting his upturned
collar as everyone in the cafeteria cheers.
He doesn’t act that way, though. His name is Nick. I
love it. It makes him seem nice, and regular, which he is.

---

When he tells me his name, I say, ‘Now, that’s a real name.’
He brightens and reels off some line: ‘Nick’s the kind of guy
you can drink a beer with, the kind of guy who doesn’t mind
if you puke in his car. Nick!’
He makes a series of awful puns. I catch three fourths
of his movie references. Two thirds, maybe. (Note to self:
Re nt 
The Sure Thing
.) He refills my drink without me
having to ask, somehow ferreting out one last cup of the
good stuff. He has claimed me, placed a flag in me: 
I was
here first, she’s mine, mine
. It feels nice, after my recent
series of nervous, respectful post-feminist men, to be a
territory. He has a great smile, a cat’s smile. He should
cough out yellow Tweety Bird feathers, the way he smiles at
me. He doesn’t ask what I do for a living, which is fine,
which is a change. (I’m a writer, did I mention?) He talks to
me in his river-wavy Missouri accent; he was born and
raised outside of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark
Twain, the inspiration for 
Tom Sawyer
. He tells me he
worked on a steamboat when he was a teenager, dinner
and jazz for the tourists. And when I laugh (bratty, bratty
New York girl who has never ventured to those big unwieldy
middle states, those States Where Many Other People
Live), he informs me that 
Missoura
is a magical place, the
most beautiful in the world, no state more glorious. His eyes
are mischievous, his lashes are long. I can see what he
looked like as a boy.
We share a taxi home, the streetlights making dizzy
shadows and the car speeding as if we’re being chased. It
is one a.m. when we hit one of New York’s unexplained
deadlocks twelve blocks from my apartment, so we slide
out of the taxi into the cold, into the great What Next? and

---

Nick starts walking me home, his hand on the small of my
back, our faces stunned by the chill. As we turn the corner,
the local bakery is getting its powdered sugar delivered,
funneled into the cellar by the barrelful as if it were cement,
and we can see nothing but the shadows of the deliverymen
in the white, sweet cloud. The street is billowing, and Nick
pulls me close and smiles that smile again, and he takes a
single lock of my hair between two fingers and runs them all
the way to the end, tugging twice, like he’s ringing a bell.
His eyelashes are trimmed with powder, and before he
leans in, he brushes the sugar from my lips so he can taste
me.

---