Super in the City Read Online Free Page A

mistaken this performance for deep conversation. He was a writer, a reporter, maybe even a divorcé; ergo, he was a veteran communicator with a soul annealed by all those atrocities he’d witnessed, a still water that ran deep. In fact, he was probably the stupidest guy I’ve ever dated, and I had projected an entire relationship onto the blankest of blank slates.
    Finally, after he went AWOL for ten days—with nary a booty call—and I was furious, bonkers with rejection, and all the more horny for being so manifestly mistreated, I called it quits. I met him for margaritas (easy on the tequila) at Teddy’s one hot July night and told him exactly what an asshole he was, which unexpectedly thrilled me. I wasn’t in the habit of telling people off and I certainly never cursed at anyone. If people wronged me, I analyzed it with the Sterling Girls, stewed in silence, and waited for the sting to fade.
    “You treat me so badly,” I told him loudly, hoping my anger was irresistibly sexy. “You treat me the way people get treated on
Maury Povich.
Now I know what women everywhere are going through. Thank you for helping me understand my fellow sisters!” I pointed a finger at him. “I don’t intend to betreated like this ever again!” I was enamored with my own eloquence. “I thank you, I really do, for giving me an experience that helps me understand the stuff of self- help books, but I’m done with this shit.”
    He just watched me, chin in hand, smiling his lazy bedroom smile, and I knew I must look good going nuts. It was a huge turn- on, making a scene like that. He slid his tongue over the length of my accusing finger and later we slept together and that was it.
    Almost.
    I managed not to see or hear from Hayden for about five weeks. I Googled him every couple of hours and would start to tingle if I even saw anyone reading the
Post,
but I kept my sticky little fingers away from his phone number. And just as I was getting a grip, having invited Rick, a web designer, upstairs after a peaceful first date, Hayden called me. It was eleven at night.
    “Can you come over?” he asked in his gravelly voice, which sounded sad, though I may have just wanted it to. I might have resisted except for the fact that I had never, in our four and a half months of simu- dating, seen his apartment.
    “Your place is so much homier. I feel really good here,” he’d say when I tried to steer us toward his place.
    So I told Rick that my sister needed me right away.
    “I thought you said you only had a brother—in Colorado.” Rick squinted at me in confusion. It gave me hives to think I’d hurt someone’s feelings, which is why I went on so many bad second dates. But Hayden made me act in new ways. In mean ways.
    “It’s my cousin—sometimes I call her my sister. I’m sorry.” I pushed Rick out the door, grabbed a toothbrush and some condoms, and headed for the subway.
    It was late, but I detested cabs: they got stuck in traffic,were gut- wrenchingly expensive, and it seemed like pure folly to accept a ride from a stranger just because his car was yellow and had a medallion. But as I frantically paced the subway platform, waiting for a train that was moseying uptown on a late-night schedule, I feared my beef with the Taxi & Limousine Commission would cost me my last chance with Hayden.
    I arrived at his building nearly forty- five minutes later, terrified that he might have changed his mind. My fear should have spotlighted the worm- eaten foundations on which our affair was built, but my blinders were firmly back in place. I don’t know what I expected—a dark little walk- up filled with smoke and the smell of cabbage, a pudgy Russian landlady in a house-dress, eyeing my ascent disapprovingly? Was that how I thought a beat reporter should live? His neat white box of a high- rise apartment in a doorman building was a disappointment. It revealed no more of him than I already knew.
    “No photographs,” I observed pointedly,