You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs. Laurie Graff

He called me when I got home. I wanted to go rowboating in Central Park. He said we should rent the movie The Lonely Guy. Andy felt bad. I was going to Connecticut. I told him not to feel bad. I would be back from Connecticut. It was a visit not a move.

      Andy called me when I returned. Many times. Too many times. Andy called from work. Now he was a trader. He traded at least fifteen stocks on each message he’d leave on my machine. The messages were long. It took a very long time when I beeped in.

      Finally we talked. We made plans for Sunday. As we were about to hang up, he got a call-waiting beep.

      “Damn, I know who this is and I don’t want to talk to her,” he said.

      “The ex-fiancée from Paris?” I asked.

      “No, someone else. Forget it. Look, call me tomorrow.”

      I was getting a headache. This wasn’t so much fun anymore. “I can’t call you tomorrow,” I said, “but I’ll talk to you early on Sunday.”

      I called him Sunday. His machine said it was Friday night at eight-thirty and he’d be back in half an hour. Andy called me Monday. Apologetic. He thought the plans were tentative. Could we try again?

      I was tentative.

      He called a bunch of times over the next ten days. We made plans for Saturday. Definite plans. I was to call him from my parents’ home upstate and tell him what time I’d be back in the city. That morning I called in to my machine.

      “Hi. It’s Andy. I’m sick. I’m really, really sick and I won’t be able to make it tonight. But call me.”

      I did. His machine said it was Friday night at eight-thirty and he was out.

      “Gee, I’m sorry you’re sick,” I told his machine. “Maybe you went out to get some medicine or something.”

      I called him again that night when I got back to the city. His machine still said it was Friday night at eight-thirty and he was out. I wondered where?

      I’ve never spoken to Andy Ackerman again so I don’t know. However, several days later I wondered if perhaps he had died or something, death being the only really good excuse under the circumstances. I called his machine. It said it was Friday night at eight-thirty, and anyone who wanted to hang out at his apartment could show up at midnight.

      I didn’t go.

      7

      Roman Holiday

      My Birthday

      Gramercy Park, NYC 1991

      Second Avenue. A rainy night. A night to remember. But more on that later.

      His name was Roman. I had met him at the 86th Street bus stop a few weeks earlier. My scene partner from acting class was paying me forty dollars to feed his cats for a few days while he went up to Syracuse to see his girlfriend play Blanche in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. I was waiting for the bus to take me across town, back to the Bohemian familiarity of the Upper West Side, when I heard someone talk to me. His friends talked to me first. His head was down. When he looked up I thought he was one of the cutest guys I’d ever seen.

      I think he just asked me out on a dare. But when I got his message about a date, I immediately said yes. He was fairly new to the city. A stockbroker, a Yale grad. He’d gone to Yale on a soccer scholarship, stopped playing and wound up getting a great job on Wall Street. We would go all over New York. I showed him the city.

      “Where would you like to go, young lady?” I got to pick the places and he got to pay. He set up the arrangement. I rather liked it. I’d go to Bloomingdale’s and buy clothes to wear just for my dates with Roman. I remember a pair of short wide orange palazzo pants with a matching sash. I wore it with white pumps and a long-sleeved white tee. I thought it very chic. So did Roman. He was enamored of me. I was his first New York City girl. And Jewish to boot. And he wasn’t. And it wasn’t an issue, because he wasn’t someone Jewish or Not Jewish. He was Roman. And that was perfect. However, he was still an East Sider, something bigger for me to overcome, but I was working on it.

      The first night we went out, he told the waitress in Little Italy we were going to fly to Toronto for dessert. He knew a place that made great cannolis. I was wearing a purple scarf my friend, Fred, had brought back for me from Spain. Roman said it became a prop for me. A third hand. He thought it exciting that I was an actress. I thought it exciting that he made a living. That he was sensitive with a sincere edge. That he had big green eyes and wavy brown hair, and a voice that threaded together so many pieces of what the world had to offer.

      “I tell the guy who comes by with the coffee in the morning that he and I are just the same,” Roman told me one night over a Courvoisier.

      He felt guilty about his success. He thought he didn’t deserve it. That wasn’t true. He wasn’t on a free ride. He was working hard. He was trading the stocks. He was earning the money. It wasn’t Roman’s fault he got there by expertly kicking a ball instead of planning it out. It wasn’t Roman’s fault he came from a loving, not-well-to-do Catholic family in Boston and did well for himself. It also wasn’t Roman’s fault that he had outgrown his post-college girlfriend, Julie, who was still in Boston going back to nursing school. It wasn’t his fault he was moving on.

      A party. My acting class. Me in a short jean skirt, red tights. Roman in a purple-and-blue-striped shirt. A Heineken in one hand, the other wrapped around me. Us on a terrace that wrapped around Manhattan. A great night.

      Now the night. The one to remember. My birthday. Roman said that there were two types of people. Those who liked to ignore their birthdays, and those who liked a big fuss. Which was I? When he found out it was decided that he’d pick out a fabulous place, while I went off to Bloomingdale’s and picked out a fabulous dress.

      I felt victorious as I combed through the racks of dresses in the Nightlife department, remembering years of birthdays and birthday dresses. This one was going to take the cake!

      My birthday had always been a big deal to me. An event. It started in elementary school with a birthday tradition in my class that was passed on from Joni Wolf’s older sister, Debbie. We would take a bow used to decorate a package, attach pieces of ribbon to the back of it and put an ornament at the end of each ribbon. If a girl were turning eight, there would be eight ribbons with, let’s say, Tootsie Rolls tied to the bottom of each ribbon. They were theme corsages. Candy, stationery, kitchenware. My favorite was from Rachel Smith the year I turned ten. Ten pink, plastic hair curlers at the ends of the ribbons with a little note saying, “After your birthday I want my rollers back.” But by that time a girl could barely carry the weight of all those corsages, each with ten heavy ribbons and one for good luck. Especially when tent dresses were all the rave.

      My mother and I had shopped and shopped until I found the perfect Kelly-green ultrapleated tent dress with white polka dots. When I put it on that morning, I spun round and round in front of the mirror watching the dress whirl. I looked like I was about to take off! I got to school and all my friends had made me great corsages. Bazooka Joe bubble gum, pencils, spoons. So now all of the very lovely, but very heavy corsages were pulling my dress forward, and when I stood up to answer a question, Murray Binder, who was seated behind me, screamed out, “Oooh, look, she has matching polka-dot panties too!”

      “They’re not panties,” I turned around and screamed at Murray, totally embarrassed, bent over my dress, supporting it with my arms so the weight of the whole thing didn’t make me fall over completely. “They came with it. It’s part of the outfit.”

      “Where’d you get it?” Rina Biller snidely yelled out. “Alex or Bloomie’s?” Rina knew full well that I had not gone shopping in The City at the wonderful and exclusive Bloomingdale’s. Rina knew my mother always took me to Alexander’s in Rego Park, Queens, where I invariably got nauseous from the ringing bells, the sales tables and the fights in the overcrowded parking lot.

      “Stop this excitement,” Mrs. Gorsky hollered. “This is stupidity.”

      I stood