The Year of Yes: The Story of a Girl, a Few Hundred Dates, and Fate

“I won’t give anyone our number,” I said, suspecting that I was lying already.

“And are you planning to sleep with all of them?” Vic made no bones about the fact that she believed that if a girl slept with more than nine guys total, she was automatically a slut. She called this the Double-Digit Rule. By her definition, I might as well have invested in a few pairs of platform vinyl boots and some Lycra hot pants, because I was past the point of no return. I, on the other hand, believed in dividing the number of men by the number of years on the market.

Looked at that way, my number was minuscule.

“Obviously not,” I said.

“Really,” said Zak, raising one eyebrow.

“Why would I sleep with someone I didn’t like?” Never mind that I’d done it before. Hadn’t everyone? Sometimes you just didn’t know you didn’t like someone until it was too late.

“Antonio, Judah…” Vic started to count on her fingers. “Martyrman for two years!” I headed her off.

“Yes to conversation, yes to dinner, yes maybe to a movie, yes to a bar. That’s it. No other guaranteed affirmatives.” Big White Cat nipped my ankle. He liked to sit in strange men’s laps. So did I. It was a problem. Obviously, though, sleeping with everyone I went out with would be a colossally dumb thing to do.

Vic and Zak were still looking skeptical, but I was resolved.

I felt intrepid, like an explorer setting forth into the frozen wilderness with a few snorting sled dogs, a parka, and some pemmican. Revise. No pemmican. Unless there was such a thing as vegetarian pemmican. Revise again. Dating was supposed to be the opposite of the Arctic. My adventurer’s uniform, then, would include a push-up bra, a pair of stiletto heels, and some lipstick. Not too difficult. This was my usual uniform anyway. I couldn’t help it. I liked being a girl. And provisions? I turned to Zak.

“Where’s my hardtack?”

Zak looked at me blankly.

“I so have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“For my adventure.” Zak hadn’t read as much Jack London as I had, apparently, but I would have thought he’d have read some Joseph Conrad. I decided not to think about Conrad. Heart of Darkness was an inappropriate reference for this, my Year of Yes.

Zak grinned in understanding, and handed me a pen.

“Eat your words,” he said. “Live on love.”

“Funny,” I said. “Woman cannot live on love alone.”

“If anyone could,” he said, “it’d be you.”

I was excited. I was ready. I was going to force open my heart and make myself willing. It wasn’t that I was lowering my standards. Just the opposite. I was expanding my faith in humanity. I was going to say yes, not just to a different kind of man, but to a different kind of life.

Mister Handyman, Bring Me a Dream (#ulink_9e99b9ac-4739-5870-88ed-b3feb6e43090)

In Which Our Heroine Plays Cowboys and Native Colombians…

MY FIRST DAY OF YES WAS, in my brain anyway, going to involve me going to the West Village and planting myself at a sidewalk café, where I’d pose nonchalantly in a cleavageenhancing white sundress, my dark red tresses tossing in a balmy breeze, and a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in my perfectly manicured hand. Ideal Man Number One, preferably in possession of a pair of piercing blue eyes and some endearing, but nonemotionally disabled shyness, would approach. He would be straight, despite our location in the West Village. He’d sit down at the table next to me, steal a few glances, and then, overcome, he’d rummage through his worn, leather bookbag until he found a scrap of paper. Make that a scrap of paper with a few lines of Rilke already written on it. He’d scribble a note and get the waiter to bring it to me with my cappuccino. I wasn’t dictating what it should say, but whatever it was, it’d be Pulitzer-worthy. I’d flip the slip of paper over, write the word “yes” on it, and send it back over. He’d smile at me. I’d smile back. My teeth, by some miracle, would be free of lipstick. He’d move to my table, we’d both be smitten, and we’d live happily ever after. Or, at least, for the rest of the night, which would, by the way, not require any rudimentary lesson in female anatomy from me.

Things did not work out quite the way I’d planned.

There were several initial difficulties with my scenario. Some of them, like the fact that it was thirty degrees outside, I could do nothing about. I could, however, address the fact that my hair was not red. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Skin a strange shade of sagebrush. I was, overall, the color of drought. My entire childhood had been spent being mistaken for a tiny, transient farm worker. Since moving to New York, I’d been taken for Puerto Rican, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, and Colombian. I’d been Israeli, Armenian, Italian, and Turkish. In actuality, my ancestry was appallingly blue-blooded. William Bradford had sailed in on the Mayflower in 1620, become the governor of the Plymouth Colony, and begat a variety of diminishingly Puritanical descendants until, a few hundred years later, his bloodline reached its nadir with me. Had I wanted to, I could’ve joined the Mayflower Society or the Daughters of the American Revolution. I was not inclined. There was one pleasing exception to the whiteness: an ancestor who’d fallen off the rails and married a Mohican Indian. Very plausible, in my opinion, was the notion that the merger with my family had taken the whole tribe down. Further down the chain was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose Sonnets from the Portuguese I’d learned to loathe as bad pillow talk. My dad’s side was a string of blacksmiths, a couple hundred years of guys who pounded molten steel for a living, and came out only rarely into daylight. Family photos showed a lot of men with blackened skin and pale eyes. On that side, as well, in none-too-distant memory, was a woman who went by Bobo, because her name had been forgotten by everyone, including herself. The mixture of lines had resulted in me, looking, apparently, like everyone’s ex-wife, lost love, or childhood baby-sitter. On the street, I was routinely entrusted with whispered confidences in a variety of languages. There seemed to be nothing to be done.

I’D RESERVED THIS SATURDAY morning for staining the bathroom floor, my ears, my hands, and theoretically my hair, with henna, a hashish-scented paste resembling, when I was in a good mood, creamed spinach. When I was in a bad mood, it looked regrettably like the maggot-filled mud puddle my sister and I had, as children, once stationed my younger brother in for “spa treatments.” Because my hair was long, almost to my waist, the hennaing was a foul process of several hours. Length was not advantageous in New York City. I’d once felt a mysterious tugging while on the subway, only to turn and discover a man blissfully stuffing my ponytail down his pants. Now I usually wore it in a pile, dubiously secured with whatever bobby pins and takeout utensils I could unearth. I suspected that I looked like a small swami, carrying a coil of miserable infant cobras on my head. I convinced myself that this wouldn’t matter. I’d get that sidewalk table, and morph into the self I wasn’t. The reddened hair, I was certain, would make all the difference. Happiness would be mine!

However, within seconds of my starting to rinse the henna, the shower plugged up, and Pierre LaValle’s version of Morse code started shaking the floor. Whenever Pierre heard something disagreeable from our apartment, he immediately began a militant march around his kitchen, banging his broomstick against the ceiling like a bayonet. This was supposed to signal that we should cease and desist. Unfortunately for Pierre, his banging had created a karmic perforation in his ceiling. I stomped on the floor of the shower a few times to signal that I was aware of the problem, then wrapped myself in a hand towel as Pierre grumbled up the stairs and pounded on our door.

Though he had a sexy exterior, tall, dark, handsome, and extensively tattooed, Pierre’s personality was that of a snapping turtle. Despite his French name, he was a Puerto Rican boy from Miami. We speculated that he’d been raised not by wolves, but by retirees, playing canasta and developing a way with melba toast. He was twenty-five, but acted seventy. He was a chef, and going to business school on the side. Vic had a semisecret Scorpio-Scorpio crush on him, but I thought he was a pain in the ass. Pierre believed in shoe polish and expensive hair pomade. My muddied locks were twisted into stalagmites, and a glance in the tiny mirror had confirmed that I looked very swamp mummy. I didn’t think Pierre deserved pretty.

I flung open the door, mud dripping down my face. Pierre, his trousers neatly creased, his hair perfectly spiky, blinked several times.

“Can I help you?” I prompted.

“Maria?” Pierre managed.

“Yeah?”

“Leak. I thought it was Zak, blowing up the toilet again,” he said, averting his eyes from the horror of my appearance. Zak and Pierre had hated each other on sight. Pierre believed that Zak was an anarchist, and Zak believed that Pierre was a pod person. Added to this, Zak typically ascended the stairs at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, roaringly drunk and stomping his combat boots. Pierre’s bedroom was just below Zak’s. He was regularly rudely awakened, which was his justification for vacuuming in the dead of night. Revenge.

Pierre’s eyes flitted to my towel, then back to my aboriginal head. Henna had a distinctively contraband odor. He probably thought I was stoned.

“Sorry,” I said. “Bo told me he replaced a valve.” Bo was the middle-aged, possibly mentally handicapped son of Gamma. His only claim to maintenance man status was his tritely sagging waistband. He used things like masking tape to fix broken pipes.

“What’s up?” Pierre said. “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

What was his problem? Couldn’t he see that I was fully involved in glamorizing myself for my meeting with Mr. Right? I tried to radiate go-away vibes. Pierre shuffled his feet and gave me an attempt at a smile. My go-away vibes were never very successful. I relented.

“Wanna come in, Pierre?”

“That’d be great,” he said. I was instantly suspicious. Hanging with a hostile neighbor was akin to hanging with a vampire. You’d end up drained of blood, and it would be your own fault for inviting them across the threshold. I thought he might be trying to case my apartment for violations that would get me kicked out.

Pierre sat down at our kitchen table, crossed his legs, and prissily plucked a strand of Big White Cat’s fur from his knee. I couldn’t turn my back on him, because the towel gapped. My clothes were in my hut. Granted, this was supposed to be the Year of Yes, but I hadn’t planned on beginning it this way. At least I could count on Pierre not to ask me out. According to Vic, he was “utterly unattracted” to me.

“Want coffee?” Maybe I could placate him before he reported the fact that my floor tiles were stapled down, and my kitchen was illegally painted with a mural, the centerpiece of which was Zak’s contribution, a villainous comic book creature, and a morbid quote by Nietzsche: “Of all that is written, I love only that which is written in blood.”

“So. You’re pretty much naked,” said Pierre.

“That’s pretty much true,” I said. I eased myself onto the other kitchen chair. Big White eyeballed Pierre, gave an ecstatic chirp, and then hopped into his lap and wallowed whorishly. So much for my guard cat.

“That’s an interesting thing you’re doing with your hair,” Pierre continued politely. I’d grabbed a box of plastic wrap and was twisting it around my head like a turban. The henna box had said that heat would help the dye to set. At least, I was reasoning, the plastic wrap would keep it from dyeing my entire face. My ears were already a lost cause.

JUST THEN, MY BUZZER emitted a muffled quack. Who was ringing at my door? No one was supposed to be coming over. I stayed put. There was no way I was going to answer it. Probably one of the twins, prank buzzing.

Pierre stood up and proceeded to admit whoever it was into the building.

“It’s Mario,” he explained, flashing me a triumphant grin. I was instantly pissed off.

“I’m not dressed!”

“I called his pager before I came up. I knew you wouldn’t let him in, so I came upstairs to do it for you. I mean, your shower’s leaking into my copper pans. Everything tastes like soap. I can’t take it anymore.”

Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard. Every day I found new reasons to dislike Pierre.

Mario was the handyman that Bo usually brought in as a savior after he’d electrocuted himself a few times. He was a tall, skinny, Colombian guy in his early forties, with a crest of black hair, a motorcycle jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. He rode a Harley around the neighborhood. His only tools seemed to be a screwdriver and a hammer, and with these, he worked miracles.