CHAPTER ONE
It was the first day of July, which meant that Austin Gittleman had 183 days to find a New Year’s date.
Austin Gittleman was the kind of guy who thought about such things. Not in an obsessive way. But when it came to emotional crises, he liked to shop early and avoid the rush.
Austin prided himself on being rational and methodical, and if you were to ask the staff of his ophthalmology practice, they would say that described him to a fault (with a possible emphasis on the “fault” part). So it was out of character for him to be racing ten miles over the posted speed limit on the south 405 freeway. He glanced at the dashboard clock of his rented Ford Focus as if he didn’t already know he was ludicrously late. Thanks to Hurricane Bethany, he had arrived in California one day and three hours behind schedule, which was more than he could say for his luggage.
His conversation with a self?important baggage claims “team member” at LAX had been less than encouraging.
“Your bag’s not classified as missing in our computer system,” the twentysomething underachiever had informed Austin without looking up from his screen.
“But it definitely is missing,” Austin had pointed out.
“Not according to our system.”
The interaction had deteriorated from there. It was possible Austin had suggested the airline employee was a gene short of a full genome. But Austin was fairly certain he hadn’t said it in a hostile way.
If his luggage didn’t show up, Austin had no idea what he was going to wear to the wedding, or the “weddapalooza,” as Stu had come to call it when his fiancée was out of earshot. Austin looked down at his plaid shirt and torn jeans. Definitely not wedding attire. Even if he hadn’t spent the last thirty hours wearing them. He took a quick sniff under his right arm. Code red.
“One apocalypse at a time” was the advice he often gave his sister when she fretted about multiple problems simultaneously. He repeated the words to himself as he turned his Focus onto the Pacific Coast Highway, keeping steady pressure on the gas pedal.
He was heading home. Although it had been a very long time since California was home. Since 1985. And it was 2007, so twenty?two years. He had known Stu for twenty?six, since their first day of kindergarten. He found it hard to believe he was old enough to have known anyone for twenty?six years.
He gazed over at the shimmering expanse of sandy shoreline. So many possibilities seemed to hover on the aqua blue horizon. Unlike his sister, he still loved the ocean, or at least he still loved looking at it. He was glad he hadn’t lost that.
His thoughts drifted to what he had lost, and he turned his head away. He noticed a cute brunette driving a convertible silver Miata in the next lane. She was wearing oversized sunglasses and a playful smile. He wondered if people in real life ever met while driving.
One hundred and eighty?three days . . . ?really one hundred and eighty?two and a half.
His phone rang. He hoped it was the airline, but it was his office. This was one of the few days he wasn’t held captive there for twelve hours—or on call to come in. Yet they were still calling. Worse, he was considering answering, which went a long way toward explaining why he was still single. This weekend was an opportunity to change that. Spying a Pavilions supermarket up ahead, he decided to make a quick pit stop. What he needed most was fresh clothes, but he’d settle for deodorant.
As he slid out of the car, he caught a reflection of his stubbled and sleep?deprived face: the hodgepodge of Semitic and Slavic features with unruly dark hair, prominent cheekbones, and pale blue eyes that suggested an unkosher dalliance somewhere in his genealogical past. He’d been told several times he looked like the actor Andy Samberg, though he’d also been told he resembled A. J. Jacobs, the humor writer. Austin suspected people were just automatically comparing him to any well?known Jewish male whose name started with an “A.” Fortunately, no one ever said he looked like Alan Dershowitz. And, for the record, he didn’t.
He briskly traversed the megastore’s aisles until he found what he was looking for. Or rather more than he was looking for. There were thirty different brands and formulations of deodorant, yet none of them was the one he usually bought. There was just about everything else, including Old Spice High Endurance, Axe Dark Temptation, and something called Happy Junk Fresh Balls (The Solution for Men).
He grabbed the most innocuous?looking container and momentarily contemplated creating a line of grooming products called “Nothing Fancy” that would each come in only one style and one scent. He imagined men around the world thanking him for simplifying their lives.
He quickly added other essentials to his basket: toothbrush, toothpaste, razor and shaving cream. He deliberated whether buying condoms would jinx his chances of meeting someone over the weekend. It wasn’t that he was superstitious so much as he feared being punished for overconfidence.
Not that he was looking for just a hookup. He didn’t have a problem getting dates. He actually had pretty good game, if he said so himself (though he was the only person who did). His problem was he didn’t like the women he’d been dating. But that sounded pejorative. What he didn’t like about the women he’d been dating was that he didn’t like them more. He wanted to feel, well, more.
For Austin, dating was like a science experiment: first he made a hypothesis about the potential chemistry, and then he tested the hypothesis in a series of one-on-one interactions before analyzing the results. But the testing phase was often cut short when test subjects, well, dates, came to premature conclusions about the depth of their feelings for him, which was inevitably followed by their asking, or more often demanding, that he express similar feelings for them.
But how could he know what he felt until he’d done a proper amount of research? He knew there were people who claimed to instantly fall in love, but it mystified him. He couldn’t comprehend how they could figure it out so quickly. Frankly, he didn’t understand how Stu was marrying someone he’d known less than a year.
Of course, Stu insisted he’d known Steffi since grade school (and she used the word “destiny” a lot). But going to the same school assemblies seemed more of a nice coincidence on their online profiles than a significant cornerstone of their relationship. Especially since Stu had admitted he had no memory of Steffi at Huntington Seacliff Elementary. Austin was the one who vaguely remembered her, because she was friends with his sister. Yet Stu was about to walk down the aisle, leaving Austin the last of his friends to do so—if he ever managed to do so.
He was thinking again about the 183 days. Or, more accurately, he was thinking that 183 was an overly optimistic number, since it included his very long workdays, and Austin had a strict rule against going out with office staff or patients.
Perhaps if he were thinking less, he might have noticed Naomi Bloom standing behind him in the checkout line. With sun-?streaked hair, expressive aquamarine eyes and six dozen eggs gingerly balanced in her arms, she was hard to miss.
But Austin was busy admiring the view outside the store’s windows and wishing there was someone with him to enjoy the verdant mountains and cloudless sky. That’s when he remembered he needed sunscreen.
He abruptly turned around, smashing into Naomi, or, more precisely, smashing into her egg cartons, which bent and burst against her formerly white camisole. Like a juggler who’d missed her cue, Naomi made a frantic attempt to grab hold of the corrugated containers as they toppled from her arms.
It was only then that Austin noted Naomi’s delicate curves and her vivid blue?green eyes. He felt like he could have gotten lost in her thick hair—along with the fragments of eggshell.
For a moment, time seemed to stand still, except for the yolks slithering down Naomi’s chest. Austin was mortified. He wanted to apologize. He wanted to pay her laundry bill. But first, he attempted to wipe away the gooey mess from the front of her shirt.
And she smacked him.
There was egg on his face, but more than the sting to his pride, it was the lost opportunity that pained him.
CHAPTER TWO
Mandy measured the chimpanzee’s swollen vulva.
The freeze?frame of the streaming video from the wildlife preserve flickered on her computer monitor as she aligned a ruler across the screen and recorded the measurement in the lab’s database. Then she toggled between program windows and tweeted, “Looks like Anastasia’s going to get a lot more action tonight than I will.”
Her dissertation adviser frowned on giving the primates names because it could diminish objectivity. But Mandy’s adviser frowned on many things. In fact, she frowned in general. Something Mandy was beginning to think was a by-product of getting tenure.
When Mandy was a freshman at the University of Michigan, she’d declared that she never wanted to leave. And she pretty much hadn’t. Something her brother reminded her of on occasion (the occasion being whenever he wanted to annoy her). But now she was doubting that she was cut out for a life in academia, which was unfortunate, given there was very little else she could do with a PhD in primatology.
“You don’t look like an anthropologist,” Tad Emerson told her on their first date. Well, their only “date,” if she didn’t include sexting and booty calls.
“What does an anthropologist look like?” she remembered asking Tad with a seductive lilt that still made her blush. She had promised herself she wasn’t going to think about Tad. But, of course, she was thinking about him. Because she was almost thirty and spending her Saturday night watching chimps have sex.
Tad had called it “monkey porn,” which wasn’t altogether inaccurate. Bundled up in multiple layers in the frigid basement lab, Mandy felt a bit like a Peeping Tom watching Anastasia parade her engorged derriere before three potential suitors. It wasn’t particularly subtle behavior on Anastasia’s part, but it was effective. All three males started sniffing and fondling her. Dimitri was the most enthusiastic of the three, but he didn’t seem to be her preferred mate. She rebuffed his advances and ran off. Mandy sighed. “Don’t be showing your goodies to guys you’re not interested in,” Mandy wanted to advise Anastasia. “It never ends well.”
Tad had said he was going to call on Thursday. The problem wasn’t that it was two days later and he had yet to do so. The problem was that if he had called even an hour before, Mandy would have eagerly agreed to meet up with him when she got off work. It was humiliating for her to acknowledge. And it was infuriating. It was one thing to be blown off by a visiting professor of astrophysics, but a trumpet player with ironic facial hair? And what kind of a name was Tad? It was like Chad but without the political significance.
She logged on to her blog and typed in a headline for a new blog post: “Mandy’s Manstrosity #37.”
Then she hesitated. Was Tad really a “manstrosity”? There was no doubt about #36 (the astrophysicist with the fidelity of a neutron), but Tad was more clueless than cavalier. She had known from the start that she had no business dating a musician. Especially one who was younger than she. He was only twenty-?five, which in musician years was like thirteen.
She’d been surprised when Tad contacted her on OkCupid. She hadn’t responded to his first two e-mail messages, despite the allure of the pale?skinned boy with overgrown sideburns. (He appealed to the Team Edward girl inside her, not that she’d ever admit to having seen a Twilight movie.) He told her he was attracted to older women, which had made her feel like a cougar, and she was too young to be a cougar. At least she hoped she was. She had canceled on him the first two times they were supposed to meet. Yet he had persevered, sending her virtual flowers to celebrate Latvia’s Independence Day. He was goofy, and he was sweet. Disarmingly so.
Now she was mooning over him like some hormonal undergrad. Even though he had been the one pursuing her. It was so unfair. Maybe she had played too hard to get. Or maybe he only wanted her when she wasn’t interested. Or maybe she shouldn’t have had sex with him on the first date.
Anastasia sashayed back over to the male posse, and Dimitri moved in on her again. She hissed and screamed, which must have confused him, given that she had chosen to come back and proffer her ripe parts in his face. Mandy wondered, How was a male chimp supposed to know when “no” really meant no? She was typing the query into her notes file when her cell phone rang. It was Tad. It was insulting that he had waited until after ten. And it was stupid, because there was no way she was answering. Well, not until the fourth ring.
“What’s up?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Not much,” he said, doing nonchalant much better than she could ever aspire to. “I was going to call you earlier,” he said, “but I fell asleep while studying.”
She tried not to be offended. She tried to focus on the positive: he was studying. Tad was pursuing a master’s in trumpet performance, which seemed a rather impractical degree. But people in monkey houses shouldn’t throw stones.
“How’s work?” he asked.
“Just watching monkey porn,” she quipped. She wanted to shoot herself.
“Me too,” he snickered. Now she wanted to shoot him. No, she wanted to kiss him. She wanted to do several things to him that required opposable thumbs.
Who was she kidding? It didn’t matter what time he called. She couldn’t get his lopsided smile out of her mind. Or his unfairly long eyelashes. She was pining for him. Pining in places she rarely pined. She watched Anastasia and Dimitri bump and grind, noting that Anastasia wasn’t asking Dimitri to make a long?term commitment. She didn’t even seem to like him.
Mandy decided that there was no point in holding out for more than Tad was willing to offer. If her choice was between a booty call and going home alone to watch an SNL rerun, she was going with the booty call. At least for tonight. And if she felt differently tomorrow, well, that’s what therapy was for.
“Are you making progress on your dissertation?” Tad asked.
No, they weren’t going to chitchat. And they definitely weren’t going to chitchat about a subject that was stressing her out. They were going to pick a time and location, and she was going to type it into her phone calendar, same as a gynecologist appointment. Mandy could handle having sex without a relationship, but she couldn’t handle pretending it was something more if it wasn’t.
“Can’t really talk right now, Tad,” she said. “I’ve got a chimp in heat.”
“Oh,” Tad said, sounding like he was hurt. He couldn’t have it both ways. Mandy vowed to never again date a musician. Or a twenty?five?year?old.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” she apologized, twisting a strand of her long auburn hair, as she often did, and lamenting what she considered its dull color, as she equally often did.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I gotta get going anyway.”
Going where? she wondered. To the kitchen of his studio apartment? And he hadn’t said what time he wanted to meet up. God help her if she had to be the one to bring up the subject. There had to be some small amount of chivalrous behavior that applied even to the most debased of relationships. But he wasn’t saying anything, and she had been the one who wanted to cut the conversation short. “So, what time do you want to get together?” she asked, trying to sound breezy and sophisticated, like Scarlett Johansson, if Scarlett Johansson had to ask a guy for sex.
“Oh,” he said again. “I kind of have plans tonight.”
“You have plans?” She hated that her voice rose an octave.
“Yeah. But I wanted to say hi and see how you were doing.” He said this with complete sincerity. She wanted to smack him.
“You called me at ten thirty on a Saturday night to see how I was doing?”
“Well, I was going to call earlier, but—”
“I’m doing fine, Tad,” she said, and she would be, just as soon as she hung up.
“You don’t sound fine. You sound unhappy.”
Why were men always telling her she sounded unhappy? And why was it always the same men who made her unhappy? She didn’t know when Tad had become one of them. More precisely, she didn’t remember when she’d let him have that kind of power over her emotions. Maybe it was when he kissed her earlobe and said she tasted like home. He shouldn’t have said something like that unless he meant it. She could feel her eyes welling up. She needed to get off the phone before she gave herself away.
“I’m happy, Tad. And I have to get back to work. Really. That’s what happy people do.” The truth was that she had no idea what happy people did, but she had no intention of telling him that. She wasn’t going to explain that her father had died when she was seven. She wasn’t going to share that she still had nightmares of drowning in the ocean. “One apocalypse at a time,” her brother always said.
“Are you upset with me?” Tad asked.
Don’t answer that, she told herself. She wanted to exit gracefully. And swiftly. “Why would I be upset with you?” she heard herself say. “You said you’d call Thursday, and you called Saturday. You said we’d get together this weekend, and we’re not. But you checked in to see how I’m doing, so everything’s hunky-?dory.”
“Do you have PMS?”
Mandy would have slammed down her phone if she had an extended warranty on it. Instead, she clicked off and started hammering away at her computer keyboard: “The first thing you need to know about Mandy’s Manstrosity #37 is that he’s a trumpeter, which means he blows a lot of hot air.”
She shivered as she remembered the feel of his warm breath on her neck. Then she zipped up the blue hoodie she was wearing and continued typing.
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