All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,24

the best, just where to wrap a sweater, or drape a scarf, or toss a ponytail. I knew how to be coy, how to be flirtatious without betraying the air of standoffishness any girl worth her salt can carry. I could carry that air with the very best of them, even the very prettiest, and I was always very bright, which in the time of BP was generally received by boys as an attractive quality. (I have found that the older men get the less interested they are in your intellect, which years ago I assumed would be the reverse. It seems to me the more confident a man becomes in himself the more he should welcome the challenge of an intelligent woman. Some part of that assumption is obviously flawed. Maybe it’s the part about men becoming more confident as they grow older. I’m not sure. )

Anyway, I had my share of boys tell me they liked me in high school, and then in college I had one tell me he loved me. That was Christian, the boy I Maced. I do regret that; not that I wish I’d married him, but the poor guy didn’t deserve to be temporarily blinded. All he ever did was love and deflower me and I was a willing participant in both of those, even if I didn’t ever really consider marrying him. I told him I did, though, perhaps because I was eighteen, and when you’re eighteen and someone is talking about forever, you naturally assume they don’t really mean it, because next Thursday feels like an eternity from now.

I met Christian at a fraternity party, wearing a baseball cap backward and holding a plastic cup spilling over with stale beer. (I should be clear: he was wearing the ball cap and holding the beer. I was wearing a pale blue sweater set and holding a Coach bag.) He was handsome and huge, a lovable lug in a football player’s body, only he didn’t play football; he didn’t play much of anything when he didn’t have to. He was raised by an alpha-male father, who only wanted his boy to be a jock and never appreciated his genius. Christian hid his intelligence the way you might cover a scar on your face; he caked makeup over it in the form of drunken tomfoolery, varsity wrestling, and overall goofiness. But every now and again, the makeup would smudge and the scar would show beneath it. Truthfully, he had a head for numbers unlike any I have encountered even to this day on Wall Street. He was also the top wrestler of his year in the Ivy League despite the fact he never trained and rarely practiced. He had such natural ability he coasted on it; I will always believe he could have been an Olympian had he set his mind to it.

He was attracted to me immediately, I think because I was precisely the sort of girl of whom his father and meathead friends would disapprove. I didn’t drink to excess, I didn’t use the word “party” as a verb, and I didn’t wear jeans so tight I had to lie down to zip them up. We dated casually for a time, beginning in my freshman year (he was two years ahead of me), and then became more serious. He was my first lover and he knew that, and he was very tender and kind the first time, grinning clumsily through the whole thing and constantly asking if I was all right. I cared deeply for him but was certainly not in love with him, though I told him I was when he professed his love to me, mostly because he took to saying it all the time and it would have been rude and uncomfortable not to respond in kind. I never imagined I would break his heart. I always envisioned us parting tearfully after his graduation and then remembering each other fondly, perhaps meeting by chance ten years later and shacking up for a weekend if neither of us was married.

The day before he graduated, I had final exams to finish and was thinking of him already in the past tense. I lived in an apartment off-campus by myself, and unbeknown to me, Christian befriended my superintendent and persuaded him to unlock my apartment while I was out taking my last exam (Twentieth-century American Literature; we read The Great Gatsby). I came home relieved and ready to spend one final night