Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-01-27- 2:08 p.m.

Milady de Winter

For a long time, Shaggy and I used to have a Saturday night spot. We used to go to Milady’s, on the corner of Prince and Thompson in SoHo, every Saturday night, for dinner and pints. It had a long a rich history for the two of us. It was the spot of my very first lunch on the very first day that I moved to New York, way back in the summer of ’96. It had a long history for Shaggy too; his dad had lived around the corner for years, and he’d known the waitstaff for years, well enough that they happily served him drinks from the time he was seventeen or so.
Kim was our waitress, and we loved her dearly. It is still a joke among my friends that Kim isn’t a person at all, but rather the Greek goddess of waitressing. Not only is she unspeakably beautiful and sweet, but she hasn’t aged so much as a day in the years we’ve gone there. She takes good care of Shaggy and I too; we’re never billed for more than an appetizer and a beer, no matter how long we stay or how much we have. Of course, her tips usually outpace the check, but never mind that.
We haven’t been as much lately; Shaggy has a boyfriend who he wants to see every once in a while on Saturday nights, and Kim’s been working less recently, and now that I’m back on the Upper East Side and Shaggy’s firmly entrenched in Harlem it seems and awful pain to go to SoHo for burgers and beer. I miss it though. There was something I loved about having a regular spot. Something about it just cried out to my sense of Hemingway at Harry’s Bar every night in Paris.
I met Lucy2 at Milady’s. She was sitting at the next table with a couple friends one Saturday night. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her; she was simply adorable. She had the most amazing glasses I remembered, retro-looking jobs with little flairs on them. I watched her body language all night, trying to figure if the boy at her table belonged to her or not.
At the time I was a big believer in gut instincts. Have you ever seen someone, perhaps on a subway platform or in an elevator, who just stood out, as if there was a little spotlight on them that only you could see? If you have, then you know that feeling when you get home, and you didn’t speak to them; a feeling of warm nostalgia and regret. You don’t know anything about the opportunity that you may have missed, but you hate yourself for missing it anyways. I hate that feeling. So I wrote my name and phone number down on a piece of paper, and as we were leaving, I walked over to her table.
“I’m terribly sorry to interrupt your meal,” I said, “but I simply had to come over and ask you your name.”
After she told me, I said that I didn’t want to intrude into her dinner, but that my name was Jay and here was my phone number, and that if she’d ever like someone to buy her a drink to please give me a call. I wished her a good evening, and I walked out of the restaurant on a cloud. It was a fabulous beginning.
About a week later, I got home and had a message on my answering machine from her.
Dating is a complicated ritual. We made plans for the safe drink, no commitments to dinner or anything that might go on too long, no plans involving anything that would distract us from the important job of getting to know if we would be seeing each other again. I couldn’t remember if she was a smoker, so I stocked up on breath mints, and fought my urge to light up during our first two drinks.
After an hour or so, the candle at our table went out due to a draft from the door, and I took out my lighter and re-lit it. When my lighter appeared, she took out her pack of cigarettes for the first time, and in a positively golden moment, we both started to smoke. I loved that moment; it told me that I wasn’t a total nervous dork, or that if I was, I wasn’t the only one. About two months later, I mentioned the moment to her. She couldn’t remember it at all, and if I hadn’t known it already, I should have known it then. I have no business being with anyone who will fail to remember small romantic gestures. I don’t have much else, anyways.
I’ve never been in a relationship I treated more analytically. I marked off signposts with Lucy2; I kept track of how long it took her to call me back, I planned elaborate outings, I set limits about how long we could go before I met her friends. I thought I was being sensible at the time. I thought I was deciding to finally look at emotional things objectively, instead of letting my gut decide everything as I always had before. But it seems to me now, that my gut wasn’t involved at all, or that if it was, it was telling me only to go.
About a month went by before she invited me up after a date. It was already late, two AM or so, and we were already drunk. She put on Wilco’s Summerteeth, and we lay down upon her bed. I slowly undressed her, and looked down at her in her cream-colored bra and underwear, a lovely body clothed only in alabaster skin. I knew in that moment that I could take her, that I could be one with that soft slip of perfection lying beneath me.
I couldn’t do it. I felt nothing at all coming from her. I don’t know what it was that led her to invite me up there, but I could feel that, no matter how willing she might have been, she didn’t want me. Not at all. And I felt old, and perhaps truly for the first time, because I couldn’t cope with that. What use was it to me anymore, after all that had passed, to be invited into the bed of someone who wasn’t hoping to find me there?
I kissed her, and listed to Jeff Tweedy sing, and soon, she drifted towards sleep. In the morning I had brunch plans with my old boss, so I woke her, and kissed her goodbye, and left. And I’m a fool, because I stayed, and continued with her, for nine more months. While I learned a lot more, about her and about myself, I didn’t learn anything new about how things were with the two of us after that night. It is important to remember that sometimes my gut is smarter than I am.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
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