The woman was young and pretty, with long strawberry-blond hair tucked behind an ear, a high flush to her cheeks. She smiled and laughed, throwing her head back to expose a thin white throat. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. I started toward them, and at that moment Joe rested a hand on the woman’s forearm. One hand, the fingers circling bare skin. He leaned in—he was so animated, was he telling a joke?—and put his face beside hers. And then he pulled away, removed his hand. Again she laughed.
Then Joe directed his gaze out toward the party. His eyes met mine. There was no shame or hesitation, just a full smile as he moved smoothly away from the woman to greet me.
I thought nothing of the scene. It wasn’t until weeks later that I remembered the woman, the delicious rose-gold color of her hair, the lily white of her throat. She had not looked uneasy or bothered in any way by Joe’s attentions. No, she was comfortable, happy in the glow of his company.
“Hi, little sister,” Joe said, and hugged me. At thirty, Joe still had the bearing and biceps of an athlete, though he hadn’t played sports in years. Tonight he wore a pale blue shirt that glimmered like a cool liquid beneath the dim party lights. He was half drunk—I could see it in the ruddiness of his cheeks and the slightest slur of his voice—but it made him soft, not sloppy.
“I can’t wait to hear the poem,” Joe said. “Sandrine is excited, too.”
Joe took my coat and wrapped his arm around my shoulders, and together we walked into the party. Joe greeted friend after friend, introducing me to people I hadn’t met before, stopping to chat with old teammates from the Bexley Mavericks and fraternity brothers from Alden College, their wives and girlfriends.
“Tore my Achilles,” said Langdon, a friend of Joe’s from work, who wore a clunky black orthopedic boot. “Marathon training. But next year, Joe, how ’bout it?”
Joe nodded. “You bet,” he answered. “Let’s do it.”
To stand beside my brother like this, in a room so grand, was not like being Cinderella at the ball but close. It was to absorb the radiant goodwill reflected off him, the headiness of all this love and adoration. I felt myself stand taller, hold my face as the wives and girlfriends held theirs, with crescent smiles, cheeks sucked in to accentuate the bones.
Joe wandered deeper into the party, pulled forward by his friends. For a brief moment, I was alone, watching him, my heels unbalanced on the thick carpet.
And then from behind me came a voice. “Fiona? Is that you?”
I turned. The man was skinny in the knobby way of a kid who’d grown too fast. His face held some of that boyishness, too—freckles, green eyes, hair the color of a rusty ten-speed—but he carried himself with adult confidence, easily holding not champagne but a beer bottle. He leaned forward to kiss my cheek, and without thinking I offered it up.
“I thought that was you,” he said.
“It’s me,” I said, and stepped back. I recognized him, but a name and context escaped me.
He saw my uncertainty. “Fiddler on the Roof?” he said. “‘Tradition’?”
“Tradition.” And then it came back: a pink-and-blue sky, the Bryant Park outdoor-movie season just begun. We had a mutual friend, was that it? Or a mutual friend’s cousin, one of those connections that was entirely circumstantial and forgettable. After a brief flirtation, we had pulled our blankets together to share a bottle of wine.
“Poor Tevya,” he’d whispered as the movie played. “All he wants is to keep his daughters safe.”
“And marry them off to old men,” I whispered back.
The T-shirt he’d worn felt soft as skin.
That night I’d pretended to be a philosophy grad student at NYU, a waitress on my off days at a Mexican place in Chelsea, a relatively new arrival to New York, still starstruck by the skyscrapers and wide avenues.
Afterward what had I written about this man? He was, I believed, number twenty-three.
“What’s your connection?” Man #23 asked now, circling his finger in the air. “Bride?”
“No, groom,” I answered. I looked toward Joe but saw only his tall back rising from the crowd. This was the first time my worlds had collided in this way, and I didn’t like it. At some future point, yes, I would tell Noni about the blog, I would show my siblings and explain the feminist underpinnings, read to them the many comments I received, the discussions that were sparked by my posts—my words! my experience! Time Out New York had featured The Last Romantic the previous month in a piece about virtual communities and feminist blogging. Watch out, men of New York, the journalist had written. The Last Romantic might make you her next subject. In the days after, I’d received a few tantalizing e-mails from literary agents sent to the blog’s general address. But I hadn’t returned any of them. I wasn’t ready yet to lose my anonymity.
As I stood with Man #23, I was jittery and distracted, wanting only to escape him before Joe or Noni saw us talking. And before he formed some connection between our night together and the blog. Did he read it? Had he recognized himself? Generally my posts revealed personal details about the men I slept with. Never names, of course, but there were other ways to identify a person. Tattoo, birthmark, snaggletooth, scar. I was candid when evaluating my partners’ sexual techniques, their understanding of a woman’s body, their kissing, their intelligence. More than one commentator had called me cruel.
But Man #23? The details of our encounter were escaping me. What had I written? As he smiled at me, his green eyes reflected spots of gold. His eyelashes were the same rusty red as his hair.
“It’s great running into you,” I said now to the man. “But I . . . I have a boyfriend, and he’s here, and this is a little awkward.” I flashed him what I hoped was a winning, sincere smile. These days I never hesitated to lie; I’d even stopped recognizing them as lies. They were simply a part of the project, as necessary as my keyboard or computer.
“It’s Will, by the way,” he said. “It’s okay, I forget people’s names all the time. Good luck with that boyfriend.” And Man #23—Will—turned away and disappeared into the crowd.
* * *
During those first years after the Pause, my siblings were busy with after-school activities and friends and homework, but I was home promptly at two forty-five with nothing to do, no one to play with, and so Noni hired our neighbor, Iris Durant, to look after me. Iris had brown eyes set very close together and a quick, high-pitched laugh. She was eighteen, just graduated from Bexley High with atrocious grades and a disinterested mother. She agreed to take the babysitting job until something better—anything, really—presented itself.
This was in the mid-1980s, the Reagan era of Just Say No and a blond Tipper Gore warning us about the corrupting effect of dirty song lyrics. Since the Pause had ended, I’d become the kid who was always asking questions. Probably this had to do with attention seeking or trying to make sense of Noni’s vivid return. I never asked about anything useful—how does the television operate, say, or why do we catch colds?—but only questions that were elusive and unanswerable and always about people. Why do some people get married and some not? Why do women carry their wallets in handbags and men in pockets? How long can a person go without talking? How long does it take to fall in love?