Free The Book of Jonah by Joshua Max Feldman Page B

into his bedroom, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, then carried the glass into the bathroom. He pissed, reached under his shirt to put on deodorant, examined his face in the mirror: high forehead, deep-set brown eyes, dark hair retreating toward the crown of his head but still thick, his nose an ambiguous feature, he had always thought, appearing at some angles large and hooked in a stereotypically Jewish way; at others more classically Roman, like something off a bust of Caesar at the Met; and, when he looked at it straight on, as he did now, even a little narrow—an almost inconsequential part of his face. It was a handsome face, in some ways getting more handsome with age—and it occurred to him that realizing you had a handsome face was really all you needed to flirt effectively (but innocently!) with the girls in their early twenties who would be at Becky’s party. He drank down the remaining Scotch, sloshed green mouthwash around his mouth.
    Going back into the living room, he put his wallet and keys in his pockets, checked his phone, and saw he had a text message from Sylvia: “7PM Le Bern confirmed. Looking forward.”
    He wrote back: “Will it be a leisurely meal?”
    After a moment she replied: “Not now!;-)”
    His text had referred to certain escapades that had occurred during certain of their dinners. Sylvia was, generally speaking, a little stiff, a little restrained, when it came to sex. He blamed this on the Connecticut all-girls boarding school she’d attended, and on the fact that she’d never smoked pot. But she also had a transgressive streak, and after a few glasses of wine she sometimes gave him blow jobs in the bathrooms of fancy restaurants. It seemed there was at least a possibility they would add Le Bernardin to the list tomorrow. It was a pretty good quality to find in a girlfriend, he thought—and Zoey, for sometimes better but more often worse, was practically schizophrenic when it came to sex.
    And so, with visions of dancing twenty-two-year-olds, excellent food and bathroom head, of professional success and a million-dollar salary and the whole cacophony of opportunity with which New York announced itself now filling Jonah’s head, he opened his apartment door and headed out for his Friday night.
    *   *   *
    Becky’s apartment building had all the character of a place a father wouldn’t mind paying the security deposit for his daughter to live in when she first moved to New York: new construction, doorman, garbage chute, double-dead-bolted doors, a plaster wall across the living room making of a reasonably livable one-bedroom apartment an only-just-livable two-bedroom. Not that Jonah was in any position to judge. His building had all the character of a place a lawyer who would never be home would choose to live.
    Becky had certainly done more to personalize her living space than he had, as well. The walls had been painted a cheerful shade of yellow, there were framed photographs and posters from art exhibits on the walls, and for the occasion a HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign was strung above Becky’s bedroom doorway. Folding tables had been set up in the back of the living room, and these were arrayed with plastic bottles of booze, mixers and plastic cups, bowls of chips, cupcakes frosted in various pastel colors—these baked by Aimee, who, it turned out, was Becky’s roommate, and someone Jonah had been told about on several occasions. The promised keg was in the kitchen, sitting in a great plastic tub of ice; music Jonah recognized from Duane Reade played from an iPod plugged into portable speakers. The girl-to-guy ratio of the guests who mingled in pairs or in small groups was about 2:1—and Jonah couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for the packs of guys poking their heads into bars all across the city and finding the opposite ratio or worse, when what they were really looking for was this party. Indeed,