Following Polly Read online

  After dinner, he asked if he could come to my house. There was nothing pushy or even romantic about this gesture; I sensed he didn’t want to go home. He took off his coat, hung it in my closet, and asked if I smoked pot. I told him that it didn’t interest me, and then he asked if it would be okay if he smoked in my house. I said sure. He smoked a joint, and then asked if he could stay over with me. Sure, I said again. We slept in my bed. He didn’t try to kiss me or touch me, but when he was asleep, he hugged me tightly. Two days later, he asked if he could come over once more. He took me to an Argentine restaurant three blocks away from my apartment. After the meal, he came over without asking, this time dumping his coat on my couch before extracting a joint from his trousers. We continued with this ritual for months.

  “He’s gotta be gay,” Jean told me when I finally offered her the details of the relationship. “That’s the only explanation as to why he’s not all over someone as gorgeous as you are. He should want to fuck your brains out.”

  I didn’t tell Jean that I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to. I was comfortable with our arrangement. And I was ambivalent about the sideburns.

  Freddy and I finally had sex. It always happened in the middle of the night. Freddy would caress my body until I woke up. Then he would make love to me very softly. He always thanked me afterward, unsure of my own enjoyment.

  Was it blissful? No. But it was nice. I liked the company. After a year, he put me on salary—for the manuals.

  Our relationship continued throughout my tenure at K.I.N.D., almost four years exactly. One day, when Freddy failed to show up at work, Julianne told me that he was deeply unhappy in New York and had moved to Colorado.

  Jean was furious. “You gave him the best years of your life,” she screamed to me, “and he doesn’t even have the decency to be decent.”

  I was more upset with Jean’s describing the last four years as the “best” in my life than I was with Freddy for leaving.

  A few weeks after he left, I received a letter from him in the mail.

  Dear Alice:

  It’s very hard for me to write this letter. As you know by now, I am particularly terrible at expressing my feelings. I don’t know what Julianne told you about my move. I haven’t even told her the real truth behind my leaving. And I couldn’t admit it to you until I was 1,600 miles away. You must know how deeply in love with you I am. I have been since I first saw you at your crappy little K.I.N.D. desk. Every morning I’d see you, and I’d try to think of ways to impress you and I always came up blank. I hung out once on the front steps of our offices prepared to strum my guitar and sing a James Taylor song as you strolled into work, but I chickened out when my sister got there first. How many times have I tried to tell you how beautiful you are, how delightful you are, how smart you are and instead ended up talking about al Qaeda or moss. I thought I’d relax when we were sleeping together. But it was clear I was feeling something intense and huge and your mind was elsewhere. I’ve tried for a couple of years to convince myself that it’s okay. I’m shacking up with the hot chick from the office, but it’s not okay. I need to start again. I love you, Alice, and I wish you a terrific life.

  Freddy

  “Wow,” Jean exhaled when I showed her the letter. “Thank God. I was beginning to think this man had problems.”

  “And this doesn’t mean he has problems?”

  “No. It means he acts like a jerk when he’s in love. Now I know why he was so lame.”

  “You think this is for real?” I asked her.

  “Alice. Look at yourself. You are stunning… a knockout. You’re funny. You have a decent work ethic, which could be great if you applied it to a job you loved. I have three goals in life: I want to make partner, I want to marry a great man, and I want you to realize that you are irresistible.”

  Yeah, I’m funny. As to the rest of it, I guess that’s why you have a best friend.

  Dr. Moses asks whether I find women attractive: I talk about Jean in many of my sessions and she asks if that is meaningful.

  I think about it. Jean is very attractive, the kind of attractive that men don’t appreciate in college but find beautiful at thirty. She’s got a runner’s body and dresses impeccably; she has blue eyes, curly dark hair—she calls it frizzy because she hates herself—pale skin, and a long nose. She is, without a doubt, my closest friend. But even she tells me that I have intimacy issues.

  “You’re the only friend that I don’t hug,” Jean has told me from time to time. She always says this in a lighthearted manner, but I know that it annoys her.

  “Maybe it confuses her,” Dr. Moses says slowly as if she is leading me to a homosexual epiphany. She’s on the wrong track.

  It’s not her fault. There’s all that information I omit. I don’t tell her about Charlie. I’d rather she think that I’m not in touch with my inner lesbian than that I have wasted the last thirteen years pining for a man who has no interest in me. He’s the standard by which I judge other men. They don’t even come close.

  “It’s not about Charlie,” Jean has told me countless times. “You’ve picked a nice guy who’s out there but not available. This is about the death of your father.”

  I tell Dr. Moses.

  “Jean tells me that I can’t really fall in love until I address the loss of my father.”

  Dr. Moses nods her head yes, which I have noticed she does when she is about to disagree with me.

  “Funny, I was thinking that falling in love might be hard because of the loss of your mother.”

  And our time is up. We had only twenty minutes.

  “You seem really good,” Jean tells me after I have been following Polly for almost two weeks. We are sitting in Ducks, a completely uncool bar on the Upper West Side that makes the most phenomenal cheeseburger in Manhattan. We’re waiting for our friend Bram, who, as always, is running about thirty-five minutes late.

  Bram is Jean’s closest male friend. They dated briefly in college before Bram made the surprise announcement that he was gay. A surprise really only to Jean, who’d found it flattering that, sophomore year, Bram dressed as Jean for Halloween. Jean survived the blow of the breakup and the two of them forged a tight friendship. The two spent and continue to spend most of their time discussing their romantic entanglements, competing for whose situation could earn the label for most toxic. Like Jean, Bram has always been a high achiever. He’s now on the verge of making partner with a management consulting firm.

  “I am good,” I tell Jean, wishing I could spill about Polly.

  “Hi, beauties.” Bram swoops down and gives Jean a kiss on the mouth. He’s wearing a jet-black jacket with a mandarin collar, which looks quite dramatic in concert with what appears to be a very recent Roman gladiator haircut.

  He turns to me. “Some affection, please.”

  I give Bram the warmest hug I can muster. He’s actually fairly good at eliciting physical contact from me. We talk for a while about Jean’s latest fling, which Bram has labeled “Inappropriate: Exhibit Twenty-four.” Jean is sleeping with her paralegal at work.

  “He could sue you for sexual harassment,” Bram admonishes her.

  “I’m pretty certain he’s in love with me,” Jean says. “He’d never want to hurt me.”

  “Famous last words,” Bram says, but he still manages to ooh and aah over all of the dirty details. “Too bad he’s straight.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I joke.

  “I’m done with gay boys,” Jean says. “You were my last.”

  “Jean. I will tell you now, as I tell you every time I see you. You have the worst gaydar since Mrs. Cole Porter.”

  “Hear, hear,” I say as Bram and I clink our glasses.

  “What’s doing, sister?” he asks me.

  “Alice got fired.” Before Bram is able to offer his condolences, she assures him, “It’s okay, she’s in therapy with a top shrink, named Moses.”

  “I’m loving this already. And by the way, Miss Alice, may I say that unemp
loyment suits you. Your hair looks divine, and you’re actually smiling. I never knew you had teeth. Now, tell Brammy everything.”

  So I go through all of the details of my termination with “Brammy” and Jean. Bram tells me to sue Mona Hawkins Casting and Jean tells me that I should move forward, that the firing was an opportunity for me to figure out bigger life questions. The two of them discuss me. I listen in.

  “The only thing bad about the timing here is that Alice could have given us some juice from the new Humphrey Dawson movie. Lots of hot hunkies in one little picture.”

  Jean always sounds like a fourteen-year-old in 1982 when she and Bram get together.

  “Humphrey Dawson.” Bram thinks for a minute. “Didn’t he end up marrying Polly Linley?”

  “Um, hellloooo, welcome to the world. They’ve only been married for three years now.”

  “Um, helloo. Thank you, I’ve been in Africa trying to help several governments develop a comprehensive medical plan,” Bram responds. “My Juice magazine subscription didn’t reach Djibouti.”

  Bram and Jean spend most of the evening interrupting and complimenting each other while I moderate. This is our typical dynamic. It’s both familiar and comfortable. For a couple of hours I’m happy to be distracted from the fine points of Polly Dawson’s unpredictable schedule.

  “When you worked for Mona, did you ever see little Polly Princess?” Bram asks me as we are walking out.

  Only for the last thirteen days.

  “Never,” I tell him. “It’s Humphrey’s movie. She’s got her own thing.”

  We’re out on the street now. I’m eager to return home. I’m not comfortable lying to my friends.

  “Boy, does she ever have her own thing,” Bram says, eager to gossip and reminisce some more. “That is one selfish broad. I’ve spent the last nine years traveling the world, and I’ve never met a more egocentric bitch than Polly Linley.”

  “Or competitive,” I agree. “I love how she used to invite girls over to her room and say, ‘Let’s measure our thighs.’ ”

  “Remember when we were having a dorm meeting in the first semester about whether birth control should be free for all students? Polly insisted that it should be and then Frances Stein offered a counterargument that some girls might feel more pressure from boyfriends to have sex if the stuff was so accessible.”

  Jean doesn’t want to go home; she loves telling this story.

  “Polly announced to the entire Thayer South that Frances was only saying this because she was a virgin and had confided to Polly that she was terrified that she was frigid. What was the term she used, Alice?”

  “Abnormally sexually averse.”

  “You remember that? That was like fifteen years ago,” Bram says.

  “Actually, thirteen,” I correct him. “How could I forget that kind of language?”

  “Bram, how could Alice forget anything? She probably remembers what we ate for dinner that night.”

  “We had granola.”

  “Okay, now you’re bullshitting me,” Bram says.

  “No. I’m not. It was broccoli cheese pasta that night, and Jean and I always had granola when it was broccoli cheese pasta because we thought it had fewer calories.”

  “Dare I ask how you knew it was broccoli cheese pasta night?”

  “Because that was the day that O.J. was acquitted. Drew Gordon choked on his broccoli when he heard the verdict, and Alan Shickman gave him the Heimlich maneuver.” I remember wondering if I would have been able to do the same.

  “How do you know it was all that same day?”

  “Bram, never question the memory,” I tell him.

  “You’re right. We are sitting with little Miss Wikipedia. And now, I would like to get back to how evil Polly was toward Frances about her sexual insecurity.”

  “She had no respect for other people’s privacy,” Jean says.

  “Maybe she’s just not that secretive,” Bram says.

  “Everyone is secretive,” Jean tells him as I air-kiss them both and wave good-bye. “Polly just doesn’t care about other people’s secrets. I bet she has a bunch of her own.”

  Polly doesn’t limit her excursions to the downtown apartment. We’ve made several other trips in the last few weeks. She meets often with a ginger-haired, heavyset woman in her mid-fifties who wears only beige. Last week, the three of us visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Could it be that Polly has a renewed interest in the fine arts? She is spending an enormous amount of time studying Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. There is no way she could be delivering a lecture on the painting. More likely she is trying to work masterpieces into her ad campaign, and replacing all of the masterpiece nudes with pictures of herself in her underwear. Edouard Manet would be proud.

  As for the ginger-haired woman, she and Polly seem to hang out quite a bit. The other woman always carries a weathered tote bag with the initials D.M. I’ve ruled out any sort of sexual relationship between them; D.M. seems way too uptight around her. I’ve lunched with them at Lever House several times and we’ve made three trips to the Four Seasons. I’m going broke doing this. It’s only a matter of days before the credit-card company calls and asks how I expect to pay for all of this.

  I’ve developed a knack for the restaurant missions. I always bring a popular bestseller and pretend to be engrossed in it, while in reality I’m engrossed in the famous woman sitting two tables away. Of course, it helps that Polly is so self-absorbed.

  Polly and I have also made several visits to the New York Public Library. Polly always goes in through the side door, again careful to disguise herself. She heads up the marble staircase, transforming her gait from that of a glamour girl to that of a no-nonsense librarian in a pink Chanel suit.

  Polly Dawson has a lot of secrets.

  I continue to hear Jean’s voice in my head. “Polly Linley will get hers.”

  Dr. Moses is asking about my friends. Jean and I were roommates freshman year, but we didn’t have a real conversation until just before the winter break. She thought I was shy, and I was. Jean always had parades of people in our sparse dorm room, sharing coffee and Pop-Tarts. I envied the ease with which she made friends. She envied my apparent ability to be alone.

  Jean and I united that December when her contact lens scraped her cornea and the University Health Services told her she had to go to a real hospital for treatment. I navigated our way from Harvard Square to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Hospital. We bonded immediately over our dislike for Polly. According to Jean, Polly had been friendly to her the first few days of orientation but distanced herself soon after learning that Jean hailed from the über unchic Fairfield, Vermont.

  “Does she even know that Chester Arthur, twenty-first president of these United States, was born in Fairfield, Vermont?” I asked Jean with bogus solemnity.

  “Ow—I’m in so much pain, but you actually made me laugh,” Jean said. “How did you know that’s Chester’s birthplace? Have you been to Fairfield?”

  “No. I have a good memory,” I told Jean.

  “You should be a history major.”

  The hospital visit lasted almost four hours. Jean and I exchanged stories about our families. She was completely fascinated by the tale of how my parents met—I think it had special meaning for her as a college freshman, as she was a bit stuck on Jack Birnbaum (this was before he left his wife for Polly).

  The year I met my best friend was also the year I fell in love.

  I was a freshman when I first saw Charlie. We were both taking a spring semester History of Paris class. Jean had insisted that I couldn’t go through freshman year without a single romance and she instructed me to develop a crush on a male within the week and report back everything. I was eager to find someone so Jean would stop harassing me. On day five, I found him. He was always easy to spot because he wore the same blue oxford shirt to every class, and he wore it the same way every time: sleeves rolled up, about halfway on the left and a sloppy one-quarter on the right.
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  The class was taught by a Professor Flatineau, an actual French person himself, born and raised in Paris. And while the course had advertised a focus on the social, political, and economic history of Paris, Flatineau spent most of the semester recollecting anecdotes about his obviously privileged upbringing on the Left Bank. To make matters worse, he often lapsed into French. The class ate this up and laughed heartily when he made a little French joke—desperate they were to show him that they understood the French language and the nuances of French humor.

  One such time, I caught a glimpse of the guy in the blue shirt: He was rolling his eyes. He caught me staring at him, and smiled. That was good enough for me. I ran back to the dorm and reported everything I could about him to Jean. I was surprised by how much I had picked up. He was on the thin side, though I thought of him more as lanky rather than skinny. His wavy dark hair seemed to grow up and out. He had pronounced cheekbones and thick brown giraffelike eyelashes, which could have made him look feminine but for the fact that he had a large but rather well-appointed nose. Jean was delighted with my progress. I thought she was satisfied until she started to cross-examine me on every detail.

  “Does he have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he an upperclassman?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his major?”

  “I don’t know. I just liked the way he rolled his eyes at the affected people.”

  “Well, that’s a start, but you’ve got to learn some basic things—like his name.” Jean had a point.

  My recollection of spring semester was (ahem) spying a bit so that I could fulfill Jean’s assignment. And, funny, the more I focused on him, the more my pretend crush became an actual crush. I started thinking about him outside of Flatineau’s classroom. Soon I was daydreaming about him on a regular basis, harboring fantasies that he and I would be stranded in a classroom or a library nook, leading to a dramatic and passionate exchange. When I listened to him speak in the class, my stomach would do a somersault.