Later, at the Bar.

The new one takes me for wine and oysters, and a few hours later, single malts and charcuterie. We talk about the oysters and other important details of the evening, like the herbed gravity bong, the truffled popcorn and the handful of characters behind the bar. When our lips meet our chins do, too. His hands hold my shoulders. My fingers touch is cheeks. We smell like fine grained booze and thinly sliced meats. We taste like smoke and the aftermath of an expensive date with an effusive appetite.

In this room.

I bet more than half of the women in this room feel fat. The other half is probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I hear British accents and a deep, handsome bass, and the chirp of women in stark black stockings and big-buttoned blazers. Women with frizzy curls in silky skirts leaning stoic against walls, wineglass in hands, jealous and judging. The men are the type who look then look away, always seeking out something newer and better, prettier and thinner with an improbable hint of challenge. These are the men that will never be happy and never know it.

Hate is a strong word.

There is nothing—nothing—I hate more than this.

I’m his plus one, and he’s deep in conversation with another writer from another publication.

In heels, I’m taller than him, and yet, he walks into the room and because of his stupid job, that (okay, I admit it) I am completely jealous of, people approach him and l0ck him into the type of indulgent, self-satisfying conversation that I can so easily identify because I am, ironically, a publicist, and can spot the body language, the compliments and the fawning.

So I sit here, totally abandoned beside him, watching quietly.

I hate this.

Health Insurance

You may be wondering why I don’t shut down my career and just freelance write.

I, like every other New Yorker with a hysterical Jewish mother, will offer the same explanation:

Health insurance.

One Big Blade

The air is the kind of cold that hurts your lungs to breathe it. It’s the kind of air that reminds me of college bong rips like one big blade cutting down my diaphragm, one big fist to my ribcage.

What are you writing?

He asks me what I’m writing. It’s fair. “Just read that,” he says, and points to something I underlined.

“Okay. Apartment hunting in Manhattan is a vain, disgusting affair in which classic Jane Jacobs New York battles unsuccessfully with the gilded spill over of the post 9-11 real estate boom.”

“Not bad.”

“Really? I just threw up a little in my mouth.”

Crosstown Traffic

In New York, subway and crosstown are verbs, too. They are time consuming unavoidable necessities, like eating and sleeping.

I crosstown bus and stare out the window as the bus turns and pushes west. Something about the slow journey brings out the crankiness in adults and the wile of children who seem to go out of the way to jump and sing so early in the morning. The traffic is ambivalent. It doesn’t give a shit about you. Pedestrians idle as they cross down the avenues, cabs edging into their right turns, their blinkers setting off hurried animosity. There is that one person who walks against the path of the bus and magically passes outside my window at every stop. I expect—maybe want—them to stop and wink. But they obey the laws of city traffic, totally oblivious. Everyone and everything is, whether it knows it or not.

On the L

When I go to Brooklyn I arrive with an earache. The train dips under the East River and no matter how hard I swallow my ears refuse to pop. Ah, the L train, land of the sweet baby doll dresses paired with heavy workboots boots, nipples, faux-fur vests, exposed bras, indecent smells, blocks of tattoos color coding the children of white class, blue blood, high strung thrift store victims awash in this morning’s hangover. The girls on the L train look like they sleep in kohl-rimmed eyes, naturally made up and everywhere to go. I am the type of person that looks around any train I’m in on the off chance I recognize someone from a past life. I don’t see anyone. Just strangers. I wonder if the train stops and we’re all trapped forever under the skin of New York City who would fall in love? Who would choose to stay underground if we were freed, gently pawing each other, making little subway babies?