Been There, Done That Read Free

draft. I hadn’t gotten to the editing stage yet. Did anyone call?”
    She stuck one electric blue plastic platform shoe on the edge of my desk. Jennifer has a preference for colors not found in nature. She smiled. “Not officially. But some guy named Dennis? First he said to tell you he called to say he had a great time last night. Then he said, no—just tell her I called. Then he said, no, never mind, I’ll just call her later.”
    She grinned up at me and tapped her orange gel pen on my desk.
    “Anyone else call?” I asked.
    “Is that Dennis Stowe? From the ad agency?”
    “Yes. Anyone else?”
    She uncovered another scrap of paper. “Some guy named Tim McAllister. He left his number.”
    My face must have frozen—or shined or grimaced, or something—because she said, “Is this bad news? Or good news?” She dropped her foot off my desk and leaned forward.
    “Neither,” I said. “Just an old friend from college.”
    A few minutes later, when Jennifer had finished backing up her novel onto a disk, I returned my calls. I dialed Dennis first. I took that as a sign of growth and healing; I didn’t particularly want to talk to Dennis, so I must really, really not want to talk to Tim.
    I got Dennis’s voice mail. I love voice mail. It means you get credit for calling without actually having to talk to anyone. “Hi, Dennis. It’s Kathy, just returning your call. Thanks again for last night. I’ll be in and out of the office this afternoon, but maybe we can catch up later in the week.” In truth, I didn’t plan to leave my desk all afternoon, except maybe to visit the candy machine, which had just been restocked with Three Musketeers bars.
    I’d been supremely annoyed when Richard first instructed me to work with Dennis, who had several clients willing to place ads only if they were assured of getting positive mention in the editorial content. “People don’t trust ads,” Richard explained, as if this were a big revelation. “They are more likely to believe something if they read it in an article. They figure it’s un-, un- . . . that the person writing it is giving their own opinion.”
    “But an article is hardly”—I looked him in the eye—“ unbiased if we are, in effect, being paid to write it.”
    He shrugged and put up his hands, as if in defeat. “It’s the way the game is played.”
    Still, I’d liked Dennis immediately. (Just not, you know, in that way .) Until he asked me out to dinner, I’d smiled every time I heard his voice on the phone. The date had ruined everything. It’s not that he was ugly; I just didn’t find him attractive. At all. And now that I knew he wanted more than friendship from me, I felt profoundly uncomfortable around him.
    I took the message from Tim and centered it on my desk. I stared at it for a minute and then picked up the phone. As I dialed, I was dismayed to discover that my heart was throbbing all the way up to my esophagus, and my armpits were growing damp. The receptionist answered, “ New Nation ?” I hung up and trudged down the hall in search of a Three Musketeers bar.

two
    Sometimes I wish our society encouraged arranged marriages. This free will stuff is a pain in the ass. Tim could have been forced to marry me, or I could have been forced to marry Dennis. It wouldn’t matter. It would be a done deal, with no guilt involved, no hours spent wondering about missed opportunities, no relatives patting my tummy and saying, “Any men in your life? Tick, tick, tick!”
    I said as much to Sheila Twisselman in the health club locker room as we were swapping silk for lycra. Half naked women were everywhere. It was five-thirty, and we were all determined to work off the bulging sandwiches and dressing-sodden salads we had eaten for lunch.
    I pulled on a faded Cornell T-shirt, trying to remember when it had last seen the wash. Sheila yanked on flesh-sucking, lemon yellow shorts and a sports bra to match. Yellow, she swore, was the next Big Color, and