Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,16
from speakers in the next room and careened off the windows and wood floor of cappuccino tint.
She signed in and collected her date cards. At orientation for the Department of the Interior, she’d been told that new hires who wanted to thrive did well to go to Nixon’s, and so she was not surprised to see Ned Hammerstein in a corner with a woman fifty times prettier than she—the woman sporting a red baize spencer and suede skirt with edelweiss buttons. Throwback Bavarian, repressed but hot.
Anne-Janet hadn’t actually met Ned at work, but she’d been eyeing him from day one. She chose a table across the room from his. And started her night. On your marks, get set, talk.
“Hi,” she said, and looked at her date. His stats were: Gandhi glasses; facial hair goateed but unkempt; skin pallid, eyes pallid.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi back.”
A minute spent. There were prompts on the list; she chose one. “My worst high school moment? This girl Dawn on my gymnastics team tried to switch the talc in my bucket with boric acid because my Yurchenko double-twist vault was better than hers, except a rat got in the bucket and died, and Dawn went to juvie, but the rest of the team blamed me. So, yeah, that was it for friendships meant to last forever.”
“You know,” he said, “you have an asymmetric mouth. I find that very attractive. I think we as humans like symmetry but that we also like to see a pattern, and then to see some slight variation. Music is a great example of that. Establish a pattern and then throw in variations. I guess what I’m saying is, your face is like a song. Like ‘Take Five.’”
Speaking of which: ding.
Ned stared at his drink. There were cherries in his highball glass; he stabbed one with a cocktail pick. Tried to stab for emphasis. Get it? I hate that my life has brought me to this.
His date scanned a list of questions. “You got any hobbies?”
“I do,” he said. And he looked her over. Her smile was big, and he could see that her front teeth were canted in the direction of her throat and that her lips were tight against her gums, all things moving one way, which boded well if you were a guy with a libido, which Ned was and was not. Not for weeks, but here trying.
“I study the weather. Weather as warfare. Technically, there isn’t much use for the skill because of the UN’s 1977 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. But the fact is, no one cares. I mean, really: if you can roll in a float of clouds just when the enemy needs a sight line, you’re saving lives.”
“Are you a lifesaver?”
“No.”
“Is this your first time doing this?”
“Yes,” he said, but quietly, as though the word, quartered among pride, defeat, disgust, and hope, were not able to assert itself.
“How about we talk about you,” he said.
“No problem,” and she told him she’d just finished six months of psychiatric analysis. That her husband’s helicopter went down in Afghanistan during a training exercise. That the army, finding in six months’ psychiatric surveillance more than enough penance for having murdered her husband, stopped paying for it. “So here I am,” she said. “Trying to make new friends.”
“Jesus,” he said. And he nodded, with the helper literature in mind. It said the only way to assault estrangement and isolation was to pursue ego diminishment. How? By living the life of your contemporaries. So he nodded and frowned and let himself be visibly moved because this woman’s story was awful.
Two down, seven more to go. Ding.
Anne-Janet had worked her way to Ned’s table at last. She asked if he was having a nice time. Her eyelids fluttered as she spoke, and he couldn’t tell whether she meant to keep them open or closed, which impulse she meant to heel.
She didn’t wait for an answer. Asked, instead, about his life.
“Adopted,” he said. “Just found out, actually. Not even six weeks ago.”
“That come as good or bad news?”
“Both.” And he thought, You are what you are until you are not. Not the genetic progeny of Larissa and Max T. Hammerstein. Not an only child. Yes, a child with a twin, who, for being a girl, was not palatable to Larissa and Max T., who remanded her to foster care on the day she was born, thirty-three years ago.