Disco boys in bars

Nov 09, 00 | 2:19 am

There was this boy when I was in the seventh grade. Isn't that how most of my stories begin? There was this boy... This one is a little different though. I wrote about him once, in passing. We never dated.

He was beautiful, with Botticelli curls and an angel face. And he was cruel. He would follow me around in the halls, shouting at my retreating back, a piece of rolled up pasteboard cradled between his legs: "Hey Sara! Is this big enough for you?" He'd grab at my breasts in the pool at the club, ripping my Halloween costume to shreds in a roomful of teenagers because he'd heard I wasn't wearing a bra underneath.

We were popular in high school, but that wasn't insurance against the cruelty of these boys. I would pass them, surrounded tightly by Claire Faye and Paige and Lucia, in their small attempt to protect me from the onslaught. It's funny, when you're that young. You don't want to say anything, don't want to rock the boat. I understood this instinctively, but it made me wary sometimes.

From the outside, to the other girls at school, we presented a united front. We did everything in synch, from the night we agreed that we were all going to "go to second" to sharing lockers all in a row. But they couldn't save me from Sean.

He spewed years and years of invective and bile over me. The day I found out my father had cancer, he wrote me a note and stuck it in my locker. I don't remember exactly what it said. I do remember that it was something along the lines of "Jewish pig cunt cunt cunt." I showed it to my mother. I wish I hadn't done that done now. That was the last thing she needed.

My dad died about a month after Sean passed me that note. Three weeks after that, our telephone rang after dinner one night. "It's Sean," my mother whispered. "You don't have to talk to him." I took the phone, my curiosity outweighing my dread.

"Sara? This is Sean. What're you doing?"

I was watching TV. "Reading," I said, wanting to put distance between my life and his. Sean never read. If I hadn't received that vile note from him, I would've continued to assume he was too stupid to write his own name.

"Um, that's cool." We talked for a little while about school and Jay's party and nothing at all.

Finally, he came around to the point of the call. "Sara. Are you going to the dance?"

"I don't know. I guess." No one had asked me yet, but the dance was five weeks away, so I hadn't been stressing 'round the clock about it yet. I thought maybe if I didn't get asked, I'd ask my friend John to take me, or I wouldn't go at all. My dad had just died. The ninth-grade dance was the least of my worries.

"Well, like, if you could go with anyone you wanted, who would you go with?"

"What?" I couldn't figure this out. It was like Stockholm Syndrome, when you're being held hostage and you befriend your captor. I would do anything to make him stop making my life a living hell.

"Tell me who you want to go with." My stomach was in knots. This had to be a trick. I was going to tell him that I wanted to go with David Kennedy, and he was going to tell everyone. he was going to write it on the boys' bathroom wall, underneath where he wrote Sara is a Slut.

"Well, David is really nice. Maybe him." I thought I was going to throw up. Why was I doing this? What was wrong with me?

We hung up the phone and I crawled into bed. Tomorrow at school was going to be a nightmare. Stupid stupid stupid.

The phone rang again 45 minutes later. My private line this time, so I thought it was Lasha. I picked it up before the first ring, wanting to tell her the weirdness of Sean's call. "Lash?"

Silence. "Um, hello? Lasha?"

"Um, is this Sara? This is Dave Kennedy."

"HI!" I said, a little too brightly. "Hi!"

"Listen, do you have date for the dance yet?"

My heart was beating so fast I thought it might explode out of my mouth. "No." I cleared my throat. "No, not yet."

"Do you want to go with me? We could share a limo with Toby and Lasha. He's going to ask her. Don't tell her, though. He hasn't done it yet."

"Well, yeah. I'd love to go. Thank you."

"Great!"

"Great!"

...

"Well, see you tomorrow."

"Okay, bye." And I called Lasha immediately to tell her that Toby was going to ask her to the dance. We bought our dresses at Lord & Taylor, Gunne Sax, after tearing about a thousand possibilities from the June issue of Seventeen Magazine.

Gunne Sax had the best ads... there was a little story about each of the dresses. Their ads went on for 30 pages, one dress per page. I chose mine for the copy. The dress was ugly as sin, but oh, that story. I still have it saved in my scrapbook.

Sean continued to mock me mercilessly, for the next four years, until we both graduated. I never knew why he did what he did. I don't know if it was a sort of apology or what. He married another one of my girlfriends, the same one he took to the ninth grade dance. They have two children, and Sean hasn't changed much.

He came to me once, in the early morning hours after a party I had in the eleventh grade when Nan was out of town. He rang the bell at 4am, about an hour after the last guests had left.

I opened the door, not entirely surprised to see him. "Why'd you come back?" I asked.

"Why do you think?" he asked gently, reaching for me. I stepped back and slammed the door in his face.

I still run into Sean in the bars back home from time to time. He buys me a scotch and I act coolly superior, much the way I did when he'd call me a whore to my face.

So, on Friday night, I hung out with Lucia and Tess and Paige. And there was this boy. I met him once before. There was something about him that first night, something that made me think about him when I got home. He was attractive, but I tend to shy away from looks. And he was very, very drunk, even if he was maintaining well.

It was the way he slid his fingers under my scarf, brushing against the scar left there by a heart monitor that had to be threaded through an artery after my surgery. Say what you will about cocky frat boys, they don't habitually get turned on by Hermès scarves.

After that first meeting, I was supposed to call him the following Monday about work stuff, but based on his drunkenness, I passed. I gave him my card that night-- I didn't have any work cards, so I gave him my snotty calling card engraved in dark-red script, and wrote my cel number on the back.

I wasn't expecting to hear from him, and I didn't. I had been told by Tess that he had recently broken up with his girlfriend of three years, a relationship that failed in a spectacularly ugly manner, leaving him badly bruised and stuffed into a bottle of single malt.

Which brings us to last Friday night. I took a taxi over to the West Side with Lucia at seven for cocktails at Tess' and Charles' duplex. The roof garden was blanketed like snow in tiny white lights. 50 degrees early November. I looked east to the Museum of Natural History. We could see over all the roofs of the city.

There was a chill up on the roof. I pulled a scarf from my purse and knotted it around my throat, navigating slowly down the rickety iron steps. And then there he was again, coming up, a fifth of Glenlivet in one hand and a crystal rocks glass in the other.

I backed up so he could pass. "I'm Sara. We met the night of Karaoke."

"I'm Adam. How are you?" And he passed me by on his way up to the roof garden.

We didn't get to talking again until he overheard me mention something about finding a Rabbi for Jo's wedding. He leaned across the table, caught my arm. "You're Jewish?" he asked, incredulous.

I raised my eyebrows. "Yes."

"But I thought you grew up with Tess and Paige?"

"We were one of the only Jewish families in town." I turned back to my conversation, and he interrupted again.

"I'm Jewish," he said.

"I'm aware of that."

"How do you know?"

"I could smell it on you," I replied, and he laughed and then we were talking and I don't even remember who it was I was having that conversation with when he so rudely interrupted.

He poured a couple of fingers of single malt into my water glass, and we moved off to a corner of the roof. He draped his jacket around my shoulders when they began shaking from the cold.

Our conversation followed a similar path as it did that first night. When I told him I wrote, he insisted on reading some of my fiction. He asked me for my card. Again. All I had, again, were the engraved ones, so I handed it over.

"This is YOUR card? I had your card in my wallet. I used to pull it out and look at it, trying to remember who gave it to me. It's pretty," he remarked, turning it over in his hand. "I kept it on my desk for days until I tossed it."

"You're batting a thousand. This is the last one you're getting, so I suggest you remember this time."

By midnight, we're freezing up on the roof. We decided to move on to Evelyn's, and on the walk over, Tess pulled me aside. "Adam's expressed some interest to Charles."

I laughed. "This is just like high school."

"Of course it is. Did he fuck it up completely the last time, or does he still have a shot?"

I hesitated. "He still has a shot."

We arrived at Evelyn's, and when the doorman started to point us towards the line the bouncer recognized Tess and Charles and stepped aside to let us pass. "It's good to be the Queen," cracked Tess as we sailed past the line.

I ignored him when we were inside, in keeping with that whole high school tradition. It felt like high school, with Tess and Lucia and Paige and I travelling in a pack, surrounded by preppie boys to buy us drinks. The music was loud and people were dancing everywhere, and he finally came up behind me in the dark, put off, I'm sure, by the man I was talking with.

He pressed behind me and slipped a proprietary arm around my waist and twirled me back around in a drunken waltz. I hooked my arm around his neck and we danced, not talking. I could see Tess over his shoulder, smiling, and I closed my eyes and handed off my drink so I could put my other arm around him.

We danced like that for a long time. Talking a little bit, but mostly just hanging tight, the crush of people and smoke and music shutting everything out. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I was making a small attempt to gain back control of the situation. Evelyn Champagne King was singing it's a shame sometimes i think i'm going insane...

Then he kissed me. We danced backwards, to the end of the bar, and he stood there and held my shoulders when he kissed me. And I kept asking myself in my head do you like him over and over and wondering if I did or did not. With his light brown eyes and frat boy grin.

I was both drawn to him and repulsed by him. He reminded me of those boys back in high school, expansive, silly, scotch in hand and lacrosse stick sticking out of the leather and canvas bag between their feet at the bar.

And this had been such a very high school night.

We were kind of old to be making out in a club, so the negotiations began. "Do you want to go home?" he began.

"No." I want to kiss some more. I want to figure out if I like you.

"How 'bout we go get some coffee?"

"I'm kind of tired," I said.

"I could make us some coffee at my place. I'll be a perfect gentleman."

"Uh huh. I believe you." We were walking uptown while engaging in these very delicate negotiations. We both already knew I was going home with him, it was just a matter of getting there. Finally, we stood in front of his building.

"I live here. Please come in."

"I can't stay long."

"Will you stay over? I don't want to do anything." He gave a half-laugh. "Believe me, in my condition, you're perfectly safe."

I looked at him closely. "I doubt that. But it doesn't matter. I'm not staying." As it turned out, I needn't have worried. He was asleep within minutes. I walked to the scarred oak bookshelves lining the walls. He reads, I thought. That's nice.

Then I took my coat and left. He called at nine the next morning, sheepish, apologetic.