Who You Know Read online

  “I haven’t had a chance to check my e-mail yet ’cuz, Jen, I’ve got some serious heavy-duty dirt. I’m serious, you are never going to believe this: Jim is bringing over a mail-order bride from the Philippines.”

  She arched her eyebrows and looked at me. “No way! That is hilarious!” she roared. Her hysterical laughter was contagious, and I couldn’t help but laugh right along with her.

  Jen did nothing halfway. When she laughed, she really laughed—a knee-slapping, head-thrown-back kind of laugh. She made this aah-aah-aah noise that was really more of an absence of sound—all you could hear was a few choking breaths between convulsions.

  “I can’t believe he’d tell you about it,” Jen said when her laughter had abated enough for her to speak. She dabbed at the tears in the corner of her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “You’d think he could at least lie and pretend he met her while traveling. We’d still know she was marrying him for his money, but at least it wouldn’t be quite so obviously gross.”

  “You know something? I read this article that said the whole mail-order thing became popular in the seventies, which just happened to be when American women discovered a little thing called feminism.”

  “Here’s to being single,” Jen said, raising her bottle of water. I clinked my coffee cup against it. “Speaking of, check your e-mail already.”

  I logged on to my Yahoo! Personals account. For a moment, I felt guilty about laughing about Jim when I, too, had turned to such unromantic means of finding a date. The moment passed.

  At least people using the personals knew what they wanted and weren’t selling themselves to escape their grim socioeconomic plight. I didn’t really think I’d find my soul mate online, but it had been nearly two years since the divorce, and I hadn’t gone on a single date that entire time. I’d been wary about getting into another relationship. I knew from experience that marriage was highly overrated, but Jen had more or less forced me to try to get back into the drama of dating. She created an account on the Yahoo! Personals and would respond to guys’ ads, describing what I looked like. When they wrote back detailing the salacious acts they wanted to perform on me in unlikely locations, she’d forward their responses to me, cackling with laughter.

  She thought her ruse was hysterically funny, but I thought it was sort of mean, or at least in bad taste, and definitely creepy.

  To get her off my back, I made up my own account and even browsed through the ads every now and then. I hadn’t really planned on responding to one, but eventually I found the ritual of reading them somehow therapeutic—it was nice to have constant confirmation there were other single people out there. At work, absolutely everyone except Jen was married. Or, like Jim, getting married, no matter what it took. We single people were a freakish minority.

  Of course, the ads could be depressing, too. Most were not particularly appealing, and not everyone posting an ad was single. Many of them were along the lines of “I want to have sex with someone who is not my wife. If you respond, you could be that person!” Others said things like, “ISO a woman who enjoys golden showers. Must enjoy being urinated on.” A little repelling, no doubt, but, on the other hand, this was not the kind of information you want to find out about a guy late in the game, like right before you’re going to get peed on, for example. This is the kind of stuff you want to know right up front.

  This being Colorado, a lot of the ads were guys in search of women who liked mountain biking and skiing and skydiving. I liked working out, but I wanted to be firmly on the ground when I did it. Before marrying Gideon, I’d dated my share of sports fiends, and I’d learned my lesson. I didn’t want to spend my vacations rock climbing and mountain biking and camping with only a stream to bathe in, if, that is, I could fight my way through a fog of mosquitoes and gnats. With the personals, I could make my desires known right away.

  Over the weeks, a few ads had mildly interested me, but only one made me feel like maybe there was hope of meeting a decent guy after all.

  He went by the moniker “ArtLover,” and his profile said that he was a 6-foot, 170-pound nonsmoker with hazel eyes and brown hair. His ad read:

  I’m not a Versace model with an Austrian accent, but I’m not a swamp monster in need of delousing either. I enjoy theater, film, good books, and good conversations. By day I’m a mild-mannered accountant; by night I’m an amateur painter. (Alas, the Louvre is not reserving a space for me just yet . . .) I’ve spent one too many Saturday nights at home with my dogs. My dogs are sick of me!

  He seemed modest yet not lacking in self-esteem, funny but not trying too hard. And there was something so endearing about a guy with dogs. He would be caring yet firm, playful yet responsible. (All those walks on freezing cold winter nights!)

  We’d been e-mailing each other for a couple weeks, and I was falling for him a little more each day. I was surprised how much I’d gotten to know about him in our daily e-mails. He’d told me all about his travels and his parents and his brothers and his friends. He told me about his frustrations at work and what he enjoyed about his job. He was a good writer, and he always managed to put a smile on my face. He hadn’t demanded my measurements and my picture as some other guys insisted on, which suggested a certain depth of character. Plus, we had a lot in common. Though I’d grown up in Colorado and he’d grown up on the East Coast, I’d gone to New York for high school and college, so we could talk (write) at length about the cultural differences between the turbocharged East Coast and laid-back Colorado.

  I loved that he was an artist, but not a starving one. I imagined him immortalizing me in one of his paintings. It would happen like this: He would ask me to pose for him. I would feign resistance at first, then relent. In his dusty, ramshackle studio above his garage, I would lie naked on a velvet couch, my legs extending across the couch, my blond wavy hair fanning out in soft wisps around my head. He would position my body just so, his fingers lightly grazing my skin . . .

  My e-mail let me know, with an excited exclamation point, that I had new mail.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Good morning! What a gorgeous morning it is. If there is anything better than drinking a good cup of coffee while looking out over the mountains, I haven’t found it yet. I always feel so at peace looking at the mountains. It’s why I moved here. That, and the people. Back East, people wouldn’t stop to gaze at the mountains unless it could somehow help increase their stock portfolio. It’s a lot more relaxed out here.

  To answer your questions, my favorite ice cream is Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food; I was in 11th grade science class when the Challenger blew up—we watched the footage over and over and my teacher cried, which almost made me cry; and my favorite book is Catcher in the Rye. (Not very original, I know. To make things even more groan-worthy, my dogs are named Holden and Phoebe. You’re never going to write me again, are you? Well, I have to fess up to every cheesy detail about myself since I’m sure you’ll extract it from me someday.)

  OK, a question for you: Are you just a fool about dancing?

  I loved that he thought I would discover all the details about him someday, that our relationship would last long enough to extract every last one of his secrets. I smiled and hit REPLY.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  I’ve done foolish things in every area of my life. The one my mother still likes to silently torment me about was my decision to major in dance in college. Technically I proved her wrong about how worthless a degree in dance was because I managed to get a job as a dancer after college. For two years I danced on a cruise ship before realizing I really wasn’t making a career out of dancing but out of looking passably sexy in a sequined leotard. When I quit that job and returned to Colorado (and lived with my mother for a few months, if you can imagine such a fate), she was quite satisfied that she’d been right all along. There weren’t exactly a lot of openings for dancers in Colorado, and that was when I got a job
doing market research. You know those annoying people who call you up while you’re eating dinner to ask you questions about your favorite dishwasher detergent? I did that for one cruel, horrible year. Then I became a marketing support specialist, which means I ran around doing miscellaneous grunt work—ordering stress balls, mugs, and pens; reserving trade show slots and hotel space for meetings and retreats. Since I got my promotion, my job is to write the questions the researchers ask and take the data they gather and put it into graphically scintillating reports with colorful charts and pulled quotes. It’s a living, but ever since I got into marketing my life has been like an issue of Cosmopolitan without the cleavage: My sentences are sprinkled with words italicized for enthusiastic emphasis and every other sentence I utter ends in an exclamation point.

  I have to say, I miss living in New York. Or maybe it’s college in New York I miss, when I was always surrounded by artists and writers and dancers and comedians who were all as broke as I was. We’d have seriously funny conversations, talking late into the night over cups of espresso about politics and books. The people I spend my time with now—my coworkers—talk about their stock portfolios, the lavish equity they’re building in their homes, their $35,000 SUVs. Since I don’t own stocks, a home, or a new car, all I can do is nod and smile and wish we could talk about something more substantive than money or the latest episode of ER.

  Of course what I miss most of all is dancing. I still dance at home on the hardwood floors of my apartment and go out dancing at clubs whenever possible. When I’m dancing, that’s the only time I don’t think at all, about anything. I really let myself go. Maybe that’s foolishness of a sort. Maybe that’s the smartest thing I can do.

  I read over what I’d written. Why was I telling someone I didn’t know about my failed dreams and my annoyance at my mother’s lack of faith in me? For all I knew, he could be lying about everything. He could be a twelve-year-old boy or an eighty-year-old woman. Somehow though, I trusted him. We hadn’t talked about meeting in person yet, but I sensed we would meet one day. Part of me didn’t want to meet him because I didn’t want reality to interfere with my fantasy, but then again, it would be nice to have someone to go out to dinner with, to snuggle and laugh with. I already knew I liked Art’s personality; after that, everything else would fall naturally into place.

  Just before I could hit SEND, I heard Jen say, “Good morning, Sharon!” I quickly minimized my browser, feeling guilty, like I’d been caught surfing porn sites. I turned to face my manager, the other pregnant woman in the office. It was a fertility epidemic around here.

  Her smile was fake as usual, so perhaps she hadn’t seen the bold Yahoo! Personals banner at the top of my screen.

  “How is the Expert project coming?” Sharon asked, rubbing her belly ostentatiously. She’d begun wearing maternity clothes in her second month. Jen and I made it a point to never bring up the baby because it amused us to see how she always managed to work it into every conversation. Also, knowing she was dying to talk about it made us even less interested. I realized pregnancy was a big deal, but let’s be honest here, she was not the first woman to do it.

  I feared, irrationally, that she would want to use my computer to show us something, and my secret would be discovered. I’d only told two people about being reduced to surfing the personals: Jen and my neighbor, Rette.

  “Right on schedule,” Jen said brightly. Jen was always extra bubbly around people she didn’t like.

  I’d read in studies that good-looking people succeeded faster than average-looking and ugly people, a fact that rather wounded my ego since Sharon and I had started at McKenna Marketing at the same time, and she was making her way up the ranks far faster than I was, yet she wasn’t what you’d call good-looking. She had a round face, limp hair parted down the middle, a long nose, and a chin that had no discernible end but just sort of faded into her amorphous neck. She was bottom heavy, with thick legs like Doric columns. She was wearing a dress with large yellow sunflowers that ended midthigh.

  Though she wasn’t beautiful, Sharon knew how to play the game. How to kiss up and brown nose and schmooze. For some reason, I kept believing that if I worked hard, somebody would eventually notice and reward me. But my chance to prove myself once and for all was finally coming. When Sharon went on maternity leave, I was a shoo-in to fill in for her.

  I had to look to the future, because if I kept thinking about the past, all I’d get was bitter. I’d start thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad if Sharon had a degree in marketing or there was some understandable reason she’d gotten promoted above me, but her degree in elementary education was as irrelevant to this job as my degree in dance. All of our experience came on the job, with the occasional training seminar thrown in once or twice a year. She wasn’t particularly good at her job; I knew I could do better. Back when she was a grunt like me, she often pawned her reports off on me to do and then she’d take the credit for my work. Yet she’d gotten three promotions by the time I’d finally gotten one.

  I had trouble paying attention to what Sharon said in the best of circumstances, but right now I was too painfully aware of the browser minimized in the corner of my screen to hear a word she said.

  “So you’ll have those reports ready by the meeting tomorrow?” Sharon asked.

  “Of course!” Jen said.

  This was an audacious lie. There was no way we’d have those reports done.

  Expert Appliance had hired us to revamp their product line. To determine how to market the products most effectively, our department was doing the research to see what features consumers wanted in appliances like refrigerators, dishwashers, and washing machines. Our marketing department was producing marketing and sales collateral, and IT was designing Expert’s new Web site.

  This was the biggest project McKenna Marketing had ever done. We were staffing up to meet the demand, but even with the new hires, we couldn’t meet our deadlines, and we were falling hopelessly behind.

  “Great,” Sharon said.

  As soon as Sharon was out of sight, Jen said, “God! I thought she would never leave. Let me just say now that women with cellulite-ridden elephant thighs have no right whatsoever wearing those kind of dresses, particularly ones covered in gigantic sunflowers.”

  I stifled a smile. Jen said out loud all the bitchy things I felt guilty for even thinking, which was precisely why I loved her. I opened my Internet browser and finally sent my message to Art.

  “So how is Art?” she asked.

  “Wonderful, as usual. His dogs are named Holden and Phoebe.”

  Jen looked confused.

  “From Catcher in the Rye, one of my all-time favorite books. I just like him more every day.”

  “Ooh, he’s literary, too. And you’re such a big reader,” Jen said.

  That was true, though these days my tastes hardly ran toward the literary. I’d become more of a romance novel kind of girl.

  “I need to find a man, too. I can’t let Dave think I’m a spinster. But I don’t think I’m ready to try the personals.”

  Dave was Jen’s on again/off again boyfriend. They broke up about every other month. He’d move out and stay with a friend for a month or two; Jen would go out with several new guys, find them wanting, and welcome Dave back into her life, suddenly managing to forget all his faults.

  It would be a stretch for anyone to think of Jen as a spinster, to put it mildly. She had an amazing body and every item of her wardrobe was intended to emphasize this fact. Jen drove a twelve-year-old car, her five credit cards were practically transparent from overuse, and her apartment was microscopic, but her clothes were always stunning. She was the kind of woman whose T-shirts never wrinkled or frayed, the kind of woman who looked head-turningly good in a sweatshirt and jeans. She had brown eyes, and today she wore her striking red hair in a messy sort of ponytail bun that said clearly, “Look how I can just throw my hair up and still look gorgeous.”

  “I wish Tom would ask me out already,” Jen
said.

  “Jen, for the record, you’re asking for trouble if you date a coworker, but if you insist on dating Tom, why are you waiting for him to ask you out? Why don’t you just ask him yourself?”

  “In some ideal feminist world, women could ask men out and things would work out, but that’s just not the way the world works.”

  “Maybe he’s not asking you out because he’s smart enough to know that it’s not a good idea to date a coworker.”

  Jen rolled her eyes.

  Tom worked in tech support, and Jen was constantly discovering software updates she absolutely could not live without. Jen’s latest strategy was to purposely make her machine crash, so he’d have to come up and take a look at it. Despite her efforts, Tom had yet to ask her out.

  “Do you know how long it’s been since Kitty’s gotten any? It’s been . . . oh my God, it’s been a month. Shoot me now. Take me to a nunnery! This is tragic!” Kitty was Jen’s nickname for the area of her body her bikini bottoms barely covered. I found it more than a little disturbing that she referred to that region in the third person.

  “I’ve read that after about three months of celibacy, you don’t crave sex anymore. But the desire comes back right away when you start dating again,” I said.

  “Celibacy? Don’t use such cruel terms. I don’t want my sex drive to go into neutral. I’m too young.”

  “Think of all the work you could get done if you weren’t trying to get laid all the time.”

  “What work is it exactly that you think I need time to devote myself to?”

  “Don’t you have any hobbies you wish you had more time for?”

  “Yes, sex. So you see just how dire the situation is.”