Page 18 of Guy's Girl
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When they finish dinner, Adrian isn’t ready for the date to be over—a fact that surprises no one more than himself.
“Well,” she says as they turn down MacDougal Street. “This was really—”
“Would you like to come back to mine for a drink?”
Ginny stops walking. “Okay.”
“Let me carry those.” Adrian reaches out for the Rollerblades.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
In Chelsea, Adrian unlocks the front door of his studio walk-up and leads Ginny up the stairs. He’s never brought a girl back to his apartment just to hang out before. It’s not that he hasn’t had the opportunity; girls practically throw themselves at him when he’s out at the bars. But if they come home with him, it’s for one thing and one thing alone, and it doesn’t require much conversation.
Adrian’s apartment is the only unit above a small restaurant. It’s one room, spacious, with a bed pressed up to the white molding beneath wide bay windows. A nonfunctioning fireplace sits in one corner. A long couch in the other. But his favorite part of the apartment, the place that keeps him sane during long weekends spent working alone, is the patio, the doors to which sit just beside the couch.
“Wow,” Ginny says, setting her purse down on the floor. “This place puts my shithole to shame.”
“Hey, I used to live in that shithole.”
She smiles. “So you did.”
“What do you want to drink?” Adrian walks over to the kitchenette. “I have tequila, whiskey...” When he opens the cabinet above his refrigerator, he pauses, noticing the two-liter Coca-Cola bottle jammed into the corner. “Actually...” He reaches over and pulls it out.
“What’s that?” Ginny appears by his shoulder.
“Homemade sour cherry wine. My grandma sent it to me.”
Her eyes widen. “Shemadethat? In Hungary?”
Adrian pauses. When the bottle arrived in the mail, he hadn’t intended to share it with anyone. He thought he would drink itafter long days of work, one tumbler at a time, savoring it for as long as possible. But something tells him Ginny will appreciate it. “She did.”
After pouring two glasses of wine, Adrian leads Ginny out onto the patio. She inhales, taking in the high brick walls, the dangling lights, the cushioned outdoor sofa.
“I can’t believe you live here,” she says.
“I can’t, either.” And he can’t. The apartment had been a steal, a well-kept secret passed from analyst to analyst at Goldman.
They settle onto the sofa. Ginny crosses her legs, setting the glass on her knee. “So,” she says. “If I remember correctly, you hate your job.”
Adrian thinks of working until 4 a.m., of incessant emails from associates and MDs, of work so rote and mind-numbing he sometimes thinks his brain will ooze right out of his ears. Sometimes, he wishes it would. “I do.”
“Why not quit, then?”
“I consider it every morning.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.” He stares through the double doors at the bed where he has spent far too little time since college graduation. “I don’t want to work in banking forever.”
Ginny shifts closer on the couch. “Whatdoyou want to do?”
A memory passes through his mind: a woven rug on the wood floor of his grandparents’ house. A bottle of orange Bambi. The old Zepter television set, on which Adrian watched Hungarian cartoons and dubbed Disney movies every Saturday morning. A treat. Something hisnagyanyaonly let him do for an hour or two before she sent Adrian out on his bicycle.
And after he came to America: another floor, another television set. This time lit by the hazy Indiana sunshine. Animated characters jabbering in blocky, unpolished syllables—entirelyunrecognizable from his home tongue. At first, trying to watch American television was just as frustrating as the long days at school, when his classmates moved their lips, voices raised, as if volume would somehow make him understand. But as time went on, TV and movies became a refuge. A place he could practice English without fear of messing up. A place he could hide.
