The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken Read Free

reception desk and waving a florist’s card at my nose.
    “Lucky Sibyl,” I reply, assuming she means the receptionist, a doe eyed twenty-two-year-old waif who garners more than her fair share of male attention.
    “Not Sibyl,” Jessica laughs. “You! Those are for you. And just look at the card.” She hands it over. “Someone wants to take you on a da-ate.”
    I’m starting to seethe. “Who told you it was okay to read my mail?”
    “It wasn’t exactly addressed to you,” Jessica pouts, and crosses her arms over her chest.
    I read the envelope, and she’s not lying. It’s addressed to “The Beautiful Woman Whose Desk Faces Out the Fifth Floor Window (Madison side).” Unless the sender’s blind, that has to mean me. The only other person whose desk faces out that window is Marvin, a middle-aged recovering lawyer with a growing paunch and a shrinking hairline.
    I tear it open. “You’ve been looking sad lately. Drink? P.S. I’m across the street, one floor up from you.” I flip the card over, hoping for more, but there’s no name, just a 212 phone number.
    I can’t help it. I dash across the office to my desk and peer out. There’s no one in the windows across the way.
    Of course it’s possible the florist made a mistake. Maybe the flowers and note were intended for someone else entirely. Somewhere, down the block, two nearly star-crossed souls have missed each other due to a mislabeled delivery. Some hapless man who made this bold gesture keeps pacing to his window, wondering why the object of his affections isn’t even bothering to look at him. He’s dejected, then despondent, then enraged. Maybe he’ll get a gun and mow her down for ignoring him. I’ll read about it on the front page of the Post , and somehow it’ll be my fault, because I took delivery of roses intended for some other woman.
    Jessica is squinting out my window like a sailor scanning the horizon for land. She’s on her tiptoes, which makes her pants rise even farther up her calves. Finally satisfied that I wasn’t lying when I said he wasn’t there, she demands, “Are you going to go out with him?”
    “I think it might be just the thing, you know, to get you out of your funk,” adds Marvin, who lives for office gossip. “Are you sure you’ve never seen him?”
    “I spend most of my time looking down at the street. And I’m not in a funk.”
    “Sure you are,” Marvin cajoles, and the others nod their agreement. “Not that I can blame you. Anyone whose fiancé calls off the Wedding of the Year with less than a month to spare is entitled to a bit of a sulk. So are you going to go out with him?”
    “Let’s just watch and see if the mystery man appears,” I say, with as much authority as I can muster. While I want to press my nose to the glass and stare up at the windows of 749 Madison until I spot signs of life (preferably hot, masculine life), I force myself into my chair, and try to look busy.
    Of course I can’t concentrate. My right brain is galloping at breakneck pace to places it has no business going and my left brain is powerless to stop it. What if everything, including my humiliation at the hands of Brendan, happens for a reason? Maybe I was supposed to waste my twenties in a holding pattern so I could meet the man of my dreams by virtue of coincidental office geography on this exact day. Maybe I needed the emotional scarring of a cancelled wedding to prove my worthiness for real love. I wonder what he’s like. What does he want from life? Maybe we’re each others’ long missing puzzle pieces, meant to fit together. The little voice in my head shrieks at me to pull myself out of my death spiral into fantasy land and Get. A. Grip. She tells me he is probably horribly flawed. Socially inept. Whiny. Blighted by bad breath, ear hair and stooped posture. He’s damaged, desperate and eager to blame a woman for his sexual deficiencies.
    No. Life cannot possibly be so unfair that it would charge back and kick