Single in the City Read online

  A couple years ago, I met Craig, aka the Scumsucking Cheater, in one of the most romantic ways possible. He asked me to dance at a ball. The Wadsworth Atheneum’s charity Christmas ball couldn’t have been prettier. We always went in a big group, some with dates but mostly not. Like me, he was with a group of friends. Like me, he was drunk, and like me, he was game for a little post-party action. Within days we were inseparable. Indeed, this was the one time when being easy didn’t seem to put the guy off…I should have known something was up.

  I know that’s what you’re thinking. My mother (and most of my friends) asked the same question. How could I have dated a married man for months and not known it, given the obvious facts?

  Fact 1: he lives with his wife. I agree that this is generally a strong indication of prior commitment. Of course I would have been suspicious if he’d always come home with me or we’d met at hotels. But we usually went to his place, a great little apartment in the south end. And he didn’t sneak off in the middle of the night either. Now knowing what I know, I should have looked more closely at the clothes in his closet. I would have noticed that they were suited to a much larger man. The apartment belonged to his friend, who was out of town a lot. How did he manage to spend all those nights away without his wife calling the police? Easy when she thinks he travels for work.

  Fact 2: I didn’t have his home phone number. The telephone is where most philanderers get caught out. He can’t give the girl his home number and any suspicious wife worth her salt will check her husband’s cellphone bills (and his credit-card statements for that matter). Scumsucking Cheater had a separate ‘business’ cellphone. He had his voice on his friend’s answering machine, and he had his own business credit card with a statement that went to his office. It was some business he had going.

  Fact 3: I didn’t meet (all of) his friends. Leading a double life requires a certain amount of discretion in social circles. It doesn’t go over well when the wife’s best friend runs into the husband out with his girlfriend. But Scumsucking Cheater was blessed with two mutually exclusive sets of friends, one that liked to have weekend barbecues and competitively parent, and another that drank until dawn and slept with whoever they could get into bed. Needless to say, I didn’t go to any barbecues.

  If he’d conned me out of my life savings on our bigamous wedding day, I’d be perfect material for one of those made-for-TV docudramas. So how did I find out? He met me one night smelling of perfume. I don’t wear perfume. That’s right. I caught him cheating on me with his wife. Once I started to suspect I wasn’t the only woman in his life (though at that point I didn’t suspect I was the other woman in it), I did what anyone sensible would do. I followed him. It took a couple weeks but eventually he led me to his house, and his wife. When their front door opened, I stood face-to-face with a perfectly normal, pretty woman. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m, uh, I know your husband.’

  She sighed in a way that said ‘not again’, and stood aside to let me in. I was surprised that she wasn’t surprised.

  ‘How long?’ she asked wearily as we stood in her hallway decorated with photos of their family life together.

  ‘Six months. Do you want to kill him?’

  She acted like I’d just told her she had a flat tyre.

  ‘Not any more. I want to bankrupt him.’

  ‘This isn’t the first time, then.’

  ‘It’s the third. After the first one, I wanted to kill myself. After the second, I wanted to kill him. Now I want to get even.’

  And do you know the really sad thing? I didn’t get to be the breaker-upper. His wife must have ambushed him the minute he walked in the door that night. He never called me again. As I think about it, I’ve never been the one to get the last word in a relationship. Talk about frustrating. There’s nothing worse than having a million great shots with no target. Is it any wonder that Final Confrontation is my number-one comeback fantasy?

  ‘I knew it. The fucker!’

  As my best friend, Stacy is contractually obligated to be livid at Mark on my behalf. ‘What do you mean, you knew? How’d you know?’

  ‘When you first had sex, he had a condom with him.’

  ‘Well, if you knew then, Stace, why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I don’t mean I knew then, but it makes sense now, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well, of course it does, now that I know!’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Hurt. Mad. Sad.’ Everybody sympathizes with the wife, and rightly so, but in some circumstances the girlfriend deserves a thought too. Isn’t it almost as bad for her, being led on, believing that her search for The One is over, only to find out that Mr Right is somebody else’s Mr? Aside from the potential for heartbreak, it’s extremely embarrassing. At least Stacy is the only other person who knows about Mark. Without wine-bar access to my normal circle of friends, I haven’t suffered from the vocal diarrhoea that usually accompanies a new man in my life. For that, at least, I’m grateful.

  ‘I don’t blame you. The fucker. In what proportion?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How hurt versus sad versus mad?’ She’s not in banking for nothing. Her mind works best in measurable quantities.

  ‘I guess mostly hurt and sad.’

  ‘Aw, honey, I’m so sorry. There’s no way you could have known.’

  She’s right, though that doesn’t make me feel any better. ‘But I really liked him, Stace!’ Who am I kidding? I really like him.

  ‘I know you did, but he’s an asshole. He’s a cheater, Hannah. You know guys like that don’t just cheat women. They cheat everyone. He’s probably cheating on his taxes.’

  ‘I don’t care if he cheats on his taxes.’

  ‘Yes, you do. That’s not the kind of man you want to be with. You’ll get mad in a few days and then you’ll feel better. You know you will, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I know…Technically, how many days are a few?’

  I shouldn’t really blame her for laughing, given that I only realized I might be in love a couple hours ago.

  ‘Ugh,’ she says, ‘I just thought of something. What about your job?’

  My job? Oh, right. I’ve slept with my married boss. Let’s see how that’s likely to play out. 1: Mark keeps me as his tarty little bit on the side, and as long as I play along I keep my job. When he tires of me, he fires me. 2: Felicity finds out I’ve schtupped Mark to get my job and fires me, or makes me wish she had. As it is, she’s already written me off as a piece of fluff in life’s navel. 3: Mark doesn’t want to take the risk that I’ll blow his cover with the little Mrs, so he fires me. 4: He declares he loves me, announces his marriage is over, we walk down the aisle together and I become the co-head of the company. Admittedly, the last option isn’t likely, so all roads lead to unemployment. Without a work permit, I may as well go back to Connecticut and live in my parents’ basement. I don’t have much choice.

  ‘I’m gonna figure out how to keep it,’ I tell her.

  ‘Good…How?’

  How indeed?

  I accept that there’s no way for this part of my life to have a happy ending (short of Mark’s wife suddenly dropping dead, which I don’t think technically counts as a happy ending). The best I’m going to do is to salvage what little dignity I have left. The sassy me would play it cool, like Mark was nothing but a silly diversion. Unfortunately, the real me will probably go psycho on him. I tend to hold it together in the face of rejection only until I’ve had a few drinks, then I snap. I admit I have a bit of a reputation along the Eastern seaboard as a bad sport when it comes to break-ups. I like to think of myself merely as passionate, though the phrase ‘bunny boiler’ has been used about me. Quite unfairly. I’ve never harmed a living animal.

  The more I think about it, the more I’m determined not to be the old Hannah. Haven’t I grown already? Haven’t I done things I never imagined doing? I am a new person. So I’m going to act like it’s no big deal, no matter how I really feel. Women in the movies
do it all the time. Kate Hudson was unbelievably cool in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (when she wasn’t acting crazy). I can be Kate. I’ve been practising my seductively aloof smile for when I get the chance to prove my disinterest. If I had a DVD player, I’d rent The Philadelphia Story. Katharine Hepburn was possibly the wittiest woman on the planet, and she juggled three men in that film. In my opinion, witty goes a long way towards being indifferently irresistible. And that’s what I’m aiming for.

  When Mark whispered ‘We’ll talk later’, he must have meant later in the year. He’s managed to completely avoid me for two weeks, which takes some ingenuity in our office. It’s not exactly Vatican City. I’m regularly camping out at Siobhan’s desk these days, but he’s cleverly worked a way around me. He phones her from his office to send her on bogus errands in other parts of the building, knowing I can’t justify sitting on her desk when she’s not even there. Then he sneaks out, the coward. Of course, Siobhan wondered why I’m using her desk as a lookout post, so I had to come clean.

  ‘The wanker!’ she’d said, echoing my thoughts exactly. ‘His wife’s such a nice woman; she doesn’t deserve that.’ Not the comforting words I wanted to hear. Something along the lines of ‘She just became his ex-wife’ would have been a better response. ‘Did you know, about her, I mean?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you’re a home-wrecker.’

  I am a home-wrecker, though, aren’t I, if unintentionally (and, as far as I know, unsuccessfully)? The longer I go without telling him what I think, the more it looks like I’m prepared to take it lying down. Which is, ironically, what got me into this mess in the first place. So when I got up this morning, I resolved to bring it up myself–which I hate to do, because there’s no way to confront a man and make it look like you’re snubbing him at the same time. But I can’t live in limbo any more, with my anger festering. It’s the injustice of the whole situation that really gets me. I mean, cosmically, am I doing something wrong that justifies plagues of married men being visited upon my heart? Maybe I give off some kind of gullibility vibe that says: ‘Go ahead and take advantage of me. I’m very unlikely to catch on before you’ve had your fill of me.’ I know I’m being harsh on myself but –

  ‘Hannah! Come in here.’

  What now? ‘Yes, Felicity?’

  ‘We have a problem.’ When she says this, she means I’m about to have a problem. ‘With the Withers party. The table cards are wrong.’

  I had absolutely nothing to do with any table cards. She can’t possibly be blaming me for them. Can she? ‘The table cards?’

  ‘Yes. The font is wrong.’

  ‘The font?’

  ‘Stop repeating everything I say. The font is wrong. The engravers used the same font for the table cards and the invitations. Hermione wants Bank Gothic on the cards. They need to be changed.’

  ‘Do you want me to call the engraver?’

  ‘They can’t do it.’

  …‘You want me to do it?’

  ‘That’d be great, thank you. Here’s the guest list. And here’s the seating plan.’

  Four hundred and eighty guests? ‘Er, okay. Just to check, the engravers can’t do it because…?’

  ‘Hannah, I don’t have time to explain everything to you. They need to be ready first thing in the morning to go over with the caterers.’

  ‘Okay…Felicity?’ What have I got to lose? ‘Do I get to go to this party?’

  …‘If you can do this properly, you can go.’

  ‘Can I wear something from the closet?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  You never know unless you ask. I can live without the clothes. The important thing is getting to the party to show Felicity what I know to be true. I’m destined to be a party planner. So I’m going to do this. It’s just some typing, right? And some printing. Of course, it would be substantially easier if I knew how to type using more than two fingers.

  ‘Hannah. Have you got a minute? I need to talk to you about the Withers party.’ It’s Mark. Standing in front of my desk, acting like we’re just colleagues or something.

  ‘Uh, okay. Is this about the table cards?’ It’s possible that he really wants to talk about the party, considering that the theme was my idea. (Not that Felicity asked for my contribution. I took the opportunity to ambush her in the ladies room.) But surely he’d talk to Felicity directly about the details, considering that she took all the credit for the idea anyway. So this must be his way of getting me alone to talk about ‘us’. Huh, as if there is an ‘us’, or ever was, the bastard. The great-looking, charming, funny, excellent-kissing bastard. I will be cool. I will be. I am Kate (either Kate, Hudson or Hepburn). At least I look fabulous. Well, obviously. I mean, what girl risks looking awful when confronted with the possibility of facing her ex? I’ve been dressed to the nines since the day I went to Selfridges. Today is my pink-Chanelesque-suit day.

  He closes his door behind us. This is definitely not about the Withers party. ‘Yes, Mark?’

  He looks embarrassed. Good. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘So you mentioned.’ I’m so channelling my icons right now. If I smoked, and had a cigarette holder, I’d light up and blow a smoke ring.

  ‘I just wanted to clear the air.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About us.’

  ‘Mark, there is no us.’

  ‘I mean, what happened between us.’

  ‘That? It was just a fling.’ Look at me, steady as a rock.

  He’s staring at me like I just told him the test results were negative. Honestly, he could show some regret over the fact that he’ll never get to see me naked again. ‘So, we’re good?’

  ‘We’re fine, Mark. Is that all?’

  ‘You won’t mention it to anyone?’

  ‘Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. Mark, it was just a fling.’

  ‘Good.’ He’s staring at me. Still staring. Don’t you dare say anything, Hannah. This is the perfect Final Confrontation fantasy come true. ‘Right then,’ he finally announces, ‘I guess we’d better get back to work.’ Is he about to say something else? I wait. He stares. I smile. He smiles. It starts to get ridiculous. I leave.

  He’s watching me leave the office. I can feel his eyes. I’m drunk with the power. This is incredible. The ‘treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen’ philosophy really does work with some guys. Now I see that all those men in love with cold women aren’t dim-witted, they’re simply the spoils of a calculated strategy. What a realization this is. If I had it in me to use malice to my advantage, I’d probably be married by now. But you know what? I don’t want to be mean, even if cruelty is catnip to a certain breed of man. As for Mark, there’s some consolation in knowing that I’ve just successfully completed my first adult break-up, and I don’t have to worry about my job. And that he’d jump me if I gave him the chance.

  Now I know what the expression ‘hollow victory’ means, as in: See, I told you the test results were wrong; I do have cancer! What good is it to have the perfect break-up when it means that you’re broken up? Oh, I know, self-esteem, empowerment, etc., etc., etc. I don’t care. I’d rather have Mark…

  I’d also rather have about twenty more hours in this day, which will end in exactly twelve minutes. Thank god for Sam’s persistent guilt complex. He’s been stopping by my desk at least twice a day since suggesting that I was the office slapper. When I told him I was pulling an all-nighter, he stupidly offered to help, assuming I had a clever plan to actually do what I’ve promised. Given that I may have overestimated the ease with which I would a) learn to type and b) print 480 table cards, my plan was more nebulous than he probably hoped. What became immediately apparent was that there’s a reason we hire engravers to do these jobs. Of course thick card can’t be fed through our printers, and something told me that Hermione Withers, a woman so concerned about the social implications of matching fonts, was unlikely to be happy abou
t sticky labels instructing her guests where to sit. Not that I know how to print those either.

  Luckily, my dad didn’t pay for college for nothing. I’ve devised a brilliant, if somewhat time-intensive solution. By buying every type of card sold at the stationers, I found one that is Xerox-friendly. I’m typing one name per page, which I’m printing out and cutting to the right size.

  In actual fact, Sam is very little help. With only one printer, even using two computers isn’t speeding things up much. But I appreciate the company. He’s pretty interesting for an American.

  ‘You mentioned before that this was a school job. Where do you go? Shit, that doesn’t look right.’ I’m on guest number 137. In other words, at this rate I’ll be done just about the time that the cleaners arrive.

  ‘It’s for my doctorate –’

  ‘Hand me another card. Please.’ Henry didn’t want to give me the office keys, or the crash course in what to do if the police come while I’m trying to set the alarm, but I was very persuasive (I cried). ‘You’re studying to be a doctor?’

  ‘Nah. An academic. I don’t go to classes or anything. It’s not that kind of programme.’

  ‘Sam, is this the kind of school where you get your diploma through the mail after only ten easy payments?’

  ‘Something like that. Anyway, I have about six months left, then I defend and hopefully then I’m done.’

  ‘What do you defend?’ Is there a martial-arts component to PhDs? Imagine ninja doctorates.

  ‘My professors read my thesis and pick it apart, but hopefully not too much. I might have to do some more work, or they might pass me.’