Slightly Single. Wendy Markham
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he gives me a big grin. We’re long-lost friends again.
“Hello!” he pretty much shouts, as is his way. “How you today?”
I grin back. “Not bad. How about you?”
He shakes his head at the misty sky. “This weather. Too cold. Too gray.”
I nod. I do trite conversation very well. “Seems like summer’s never going to come.” See?
“Oh, it’s coming,” he says with the conviction of a waiter at Smith & Wollensky vouching for the prime rib. “Then when it gets here, you complain.”
I wonder whether he’s employing the collective you, or if I’m supposed to take it as a sign that I’ll be miserable this summer, not just because the city is so goddamned hot from June through September, but because Will won’t be in it with me.
Two
Will’s studio apartment is on the twenty-sixth floor of a high-rise doorman building with a marble lobby and three elevators. It’s the closest thing to what my small-town upstate self used to imagine was a typical New York City dwelling. The building, I mean. The apartment is pretty much a letdown. But aren’t they all?
Growing up in Brookside, I watched a lot of TV. Mainly sitcoms, and in most of them, the setting was New York. Thus I was weaned on Monica and Rachel’s sprawling two-bedroom with oversize windows and a terrace-like fire escape, and the Huxtables’ elaborate Brooklyn Heights brownstone with an actual yard and Jerry Seinfeld’s spacious West Side one-bedroom complete with wacky neighbor.
Ha.
My place, you already know about.
Will’s place, I’ll describe as little more than a fairly large square room with square office-building-like plate glass windows along one end, and at the other, a separate kitchen the size of the stairway landing in my parents’ Queen Anne Victorian. His bed is by the windows; Nerissa’s futon and dresser are behind the aforementioned folding screen near the kitchen. In between are a semi-tacky black leather couch Will bought from the previous tenant whose fiancée wouldn’t let him bring it to the marriage, Will’s workout equipment and a bookshelf crammed with CDs, scripts, Playbills and a few actual books, mostly paperback classics he couldn’t sell back to the college bookstore after two semesters of American Lit.
Having buzzed me in, you’d think Will would be waiting with the door propped open, or at least somewhere near it. But I have to knock twice, and when he finally opens it, he’s rumpled and yawning, obviously having just rolled out of bed.
He looks fabulous anyway. At least, he does to me.
Kate once announced, after two stiff bourbons at the Royalton, that she thinks there’s something vaguely faggy about Will, and that she’s not the least bit attracted to him. This disturbed me profoundly for reasons I can’t quite grasp. Ever since, there are times when I look at Will and find myself searching for signs of latent homosexuality, half-expecting him to mince or sashay or toss a lusty leer at James, his strapping, too-beautiful-to-be-straight doorman. So far he never has, and I don’t know what it is about him that Kate sees as effeminate. She doesn’t even know about the plants in college, which, by the way, are still thriving years later on his windowsill.
Maybe it’s just the musical theater thing—so many actors are gay, and she can’t shake the stereotype because she’s from the Deep South. Or do I blame too many of her hangups on that?
In any case, as far as I’m concerned, Will is masculinity personified. Think Noel from Felicity meets Ben from Felicity and that’s pretty much Will. He’s six-foot-one and clean-shaven, with a well-defined jaw and a cleft in his chin. He has thick dark-brown hair that has looked incredibly good with sideburns, or shaggy past his earlobes or close-cropped, as it is now. His not-quite-blue, not-quite-gray eyes are the precise color of my favorite J. Crew sweater, described as Smoke in the catalogue. He works out all the time, meaning he’s lean and muscular. He frequently wears black turtlenecks, and he always wears cologne.
Where I come from, cologne, like jewelry, is worn only by Italian men—including my dad and brothers—or by Jason Miller, the local hairdresser of ambiguous sexual orientation. Okay, ambiguous only to my mother, who has speculated on more than one occasion how strange it is that such a sweet, handsome man isn’t married yet. My mother also assumes without question that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that O.J. is looking for the real killers and that all my adult life I’ve been going to weekly Sunday mass and Saturday confession.
In any case, maybe the cologne thing triggered Kate’s comment about Will being faggy.
Even now, first thing in the morning—at least, what is considered first thing in the morning on Will’s schedule and might be the brunching hour on anyone else’s—he smells great and looks incredibly appealing in a rumpled, sexy way. Somehow, there is no morning breath; there is no Bed Head.
“Did I wake you?” I ask, tiptoeing to kiss his cheek, which is barely covered with stubble.
“It’s okay.” He yawns and pads to the kitchen area, where he fills a glass from the Poland Spring cooler that’s jammed into the corner between the stove and fridge.
“How was last night?”
“Exhausting. A bunch of dowdy East Side dowagers and their philandering husbands. A martini bar and beef carpaccio, even though carpaccio’s been over for years.”
“What about martinis?”
“With this crowd they’re always in.”
I should mention that Will works for Eat Drink Or Be Married, a Manhattan caterer. He makes excellent money waitering at private events like weddings and charity dinners. Most of the guests are high profile, and sometimes he’s privy to great celebrity dirt, which I find fascinating.
“Listen, Trace, I know we’re supposed to go to your friend’s party tonight, but I have to work.”
“What?” Stabbing disappointment. “But we’ve been planning this for weeks! It’s Raphael’s thirtieth birthday.”
I have to wait for Will to drain the full glass of water, something he does eight times a day, before he says, “I know, and I had asked Milos to let me have off tonight, but he got into a bind. Jason fell at the rink yesterday and twisted his ankle.”
Jason, one of the other waiters, happens to be Jason Kenyon, the former Olympic figure skater. I’m not that big on following sports, but even I’ve heard of him—I think he got a bronze medal a few years ago in Japan. Now he’s trying to make it as an actor here in New York, and he must be as broke as anyone else, because he’s willing to wear a Nehru jacket while lugging monstrous trays around and clearing away rich people’s plates. Not that it isn’t worth it. They make twenty bucks an hour, plus tips.
“Can’t Milos find somebody else to fill in?” I ask.
“He doesn’t want just anyone. It’s a big celebrity wedding out in the Hamptons, and he only wants a certain quality of waiter there.”
“Flattering for you, but where does that leave me?”
Will puts his glass in the sink, then leans over and kisses my cheek. “Sorry, Trace.”
I pout, then ask, “Which celebrity?”
“I can’t say.”
“You can’t say?” I gape at him—or rather, his back, since he’s retreated to the other side of the room. I follow him. “Not even to me?”
“I’m sworn to absolute secrecy,” he says blandly, removing his long-sleeved thermal T-shirt and tossing it into a nearby laundry basket. “You’ll know tomorrow, though. It’ll be in all the papers.”
“So tell me now. I’m dying to know.”
“I can’t. Look, I don’t even know exactly where the wedding is going to be held. They don’t want anyone