“So what’s he like?” Anne asked, puffing, inhaling and exhaling.
“He’s tall.”
“Tall? How tall?”
“Very tall. Six six.”
“That’s not tall. That’s verging on—”
“Freakish. I know.”
“But he’s cute?”
I plucked a Flair pen off my desk, uncapped it, then stuck the cap in my mouth: Cigarette Substitution Fantasy Disorder. “Very cute. Dark hair. Glasses. Jock-ish build even though he never—” I stopped myself before launching into his whole fear-of-sports-competition thing. Anne would never understand. While she could certainly recognize it, she wasn’t particularly interested in self-destructive neurotic behavior. Which is why I decided to try not to mention my discomfort about the existence of Adrienne.
“Even though he never what?”
“Nothing.”
“You were going to say something.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“Yes you were.” I heard her puffing into the phone suspiciously. “There’s something you’re not telling me.” More puffing. “He’s married. Is he married?”
“No, he’s not married!”
“Well, what is he then? Gay?” She puffed, coughed, and finally said, under what little breath she had left: “I knew he sounded too good to be true.”
“No, he’s not gay either.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“It’s nothing really,” I gave in. “It’s just that there’s this old girlfriend. Ex-fiancée, actually. Who he’s still friends with.”
“Friends with? What kind of friends with? Fuck-buddy friends with?” That’s what Sassy had called exes who still slept together.
“No! They’re not fuck-buddies!”
“Then they’re just friend-friends.”
“Right.”
Friend-friends. That magazine had made morons out of both of us.
“And?” she asked.
“And what? I’m just sort of curious about her.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you curious about her?”
Wasn’t it obvious? “Because she’s his ex.”
“Not good enough.”
“Of course that’s good enough. Every woman is curious about her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Not that we’re boyfriend-and-girlfriend yet,” I was quick to clarify, since we were still, technically, not for much longer I hoped, just friend-friends. “Aren’t they?”
Anne was silent. “You want my advice?” she finally said.
“Sure.”
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
I rolled my eyes.
“If it doesn’t itch, don’t scratch it.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“Look, Elise,” she said. “You got out of Sassy . You got out of New York. And now, you’ve met a great guy. So to celebrate all your good news, I’m going to let you turn in Fit to Fat two weeks early.”
“Fat to Fit.”
“Whatever.”
Whatever.
“Sounds like you have the world by the balls,” she said right before hanging up. “Maybe Washington’s not so bad after all.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe it wasn’t. I paced around my apartment, then lay prone on the couch for the next four hours, woozy with possibility. A new life. A new career. Donald.
I guess I did have the world by the balls. Only I had no idea what to do with it.
Had Dr. Frond heard me say that, she would have immediately pounced. Eyes and voice and body language trained to betray no visible sign of interest or disinterest (she was a true Freudian), she would, nonetheless, in her mild but unmistakable Eastern European accent (Berlin? Vienna? Prague? She would never tell me where she was from, nor divulge any other personal information. Donald, however, after everything I’d told him, began to suspect she was from New Jersey) lead me by the scruff of the neck to my little mess of neurosis and push my nose in it.