Dating Big Bird Read Online Free PDF

if not proof of the fact that it was me who hadn’t changed. That despite the passage of time and all the “personal growth” that supposedly went with it—the career achievements; the years of therapy with their requisite epiphanies and behavior-altering breakthroughs; the romantic relationships that hopefully become less and less pathological the older and wiser you become—I was, deep down, insecure and mistrustful of people who seemed to have it too easy in life. Like Amy. Whether her life had been sheer misery from graduation day until now or had been movie perfect shouldn’t have mattered to me for the reasons it did. Her success did not ipso facto mean my failure, or vice versa. And before I saw her again, I had to get over the years when in my mind it did.
    I had made a seven-thirty reservation for us at Café Loup, a softly lit, deeply pretentious French bistro on West Thirteenth Street. Even though she lived on the Upper West Side, Amy said she didn’t mind meeting all the way downtown—we were both coming from midtown right after work anyway—and I was glad she’d agreed. The older I’d gotten, the more intolerant I’d become of noisy restaurants where you couldn’t hear what the person sitting across from you was saying. Among other things.
    “Wait!” I said when we first sat down, interrupting ahilarious anecdote Amy was telling about a recent diaper change that went awry on someone’s Oriental rug. “I want to know what you’ve been doing since 1980.”
    “You mean, we should put this mental illness in context,” she said.
    “Exactly.”
    I liked this woman. Even though she probably wasn’t perverse enough to have a copy of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(the bible of all shrinks) sitting on her coffee table as I did, she understood what we were dealing with here.
    “Do I have to go all the way back to high school?”
    “No,” I said magnanimously, as if I were about to let her off the hook. “Just go back to after high school.”
    “Which is when it all started to go downhill.”
    She took a sip from her glass of wine and then took a deep breath as if she were summoning up the energy needed to tell seventeen years’ worth of personal history in one sentence.
    “Okay. You remember Jonathan. Well, after high school, we went to Princeton together. I was an English major, and he was pre-med. And all along it was … well, it was assumed that we were going to get married. We talked about marriage. His parents talked about marriage. My parents talked about marriage. It was just a question of when. Obviously we were going to wait—definitely until he was in medical school and probably until after he graduated.” She picked up her glass of wine and let it rest against her cheek.
    “So we graduated,” she continued. “He and I both got into Columbia—me for law school—I was going to change the world like Mr. Collacci”—our American history teacher—“told us to. Not that becoming a real estate lawyer is a world-changing profession. But anyway we moved here. We studied. We graduated. We stayed so he could do his internship and residency here. I got an associate’s position atDavis, Polk, and we found a great co-op on West Seventy-second Street, which his parents paid for: an early engagement gift.”
    “And this was, what,” I asked, doing a quick mental calculation, “seven years ago?” I was trying to remember what I was doing then: closing on my own co-op; recovering from a particularly nasty breakup with Ross, a coworker at J. Walter Thompson; giving notice at J. Walter Thompson in the wake of that breakup—but not because of it—and going to work for Karen Lipps, Inc., full time.
    “Seven.”
    “Sorry. Go on.”
    “And then we got engaged. And then we started planning the wedding—which is when I started to wonder what I was getting myself into.”
    The waiter arrived, clearing away our salads and returning with our steaks—hers rare and mine well done.