The Ding

I had just gotten off the phone with my manager. I was being laid off. It was my third job in less than a year. I dropped two ice cubes into a glass and poured myself chardonnay to the brim. I sipped until it was no longer on the brink of overflowing and took it outside onto my balcony. I dragged the second chair closer to the table and propped my feet on it. I closed my eyes, leaning my head back. It wasn’t very nice out; a leftover chill still clung to the air from the just passing winter. I’d lost three jobs and a boyfriend in the past year, a serious boyfriend, a man I loved to the moon and back, a man I would have done just about anything for and who I thought felt the same. But he left me around Thanksgiving, what they call a “turkey drop” when a couple goes off to college and breaks things off around the holiday. But I was thirty-four, not eighteen, and we had been together since I was thirty, when I thought I had all the time in the bloody world. 

To make matters worse, he left me for a woman named Helen. They worked together. I’d never met her and Jamie, my boyfriend, had hardly ever mentioned her. While he told me of their affair, I quickly formed an image of her, which consisted of her looking like a standard poodle with a long, narrow snout and tufts of curly hair. She wore a pinstriped suit in my imagination and knew precisely what to do with escarole. She was also great at hosting dinner parties, and genuinely enjoyed throwing them. She was neat. She decorated her apartment with coffee table books and plants (and knew how to keep them alive!) and kept her cuticles trimmed. Any and all of my shortcomings—frying an egg, never hitting snooze, leaving an eloquent voicemail—Helen was a master of, Helen completed with grace and poise, Helen knew how to do because Helen was more of a grown woman than I could ever hope to be.

As I drank great gulps of the too-sweet wine, batting away several flies that began to swarm as well as the fogginess from my eyes as I had finally succumbed to big bouts of ugly, heaving sobs, you walked onto the balcony across from mine. You sat down across from me with a mug in your hand, which was more appropriate than my drink seeing as it was only half-past nine in the morning, and you waved. I popped inside, wiped my snot, and brought the rest of the bottle out, smacking it down on the metal table. I pretended not to have seen you, so you shouted.

“Hi! You look like you’re having one hell of a morning,” you said.

“Mmm,” I mumbled, not even loud enough for you to have heard.

“You okay?” I shook my head, no. I finished the rest of the second glass. I poured myself a third. I remembered this was my last bottle in the apartment. I poured myself only half the glass. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m fine, really. Came out for some peace and quiet.”

“Sorry, I’ll leave you be,” you said. You stared down at your legs. You hadn’t brought anything out with you onto the balcony besides the mug—no phone, no newspaper, no book. You reminded me of those people on airplanes who don’t bring anything to do during long flights, insane people. 

“Well, if you really want to know. I just lost my job, my third job in less than a year. To hell with this virus.”

“In that case…” you said, disappearing into your apartment and emerging with a bottle of Bailey’s. You poured it into your mug and raised it toward me. I scoffed. I tucked my hair behind my ears. You were very handsome, even at a distance, even through the sad gray blur of my vision. I wiped at my eyes. “What are you going to do the rest of the day? How are you going to spend your unemployment?”

“Filing, I guess, once again, for unemployment, rom-coms playing on a loop in the background. Oh, did I forget to mention? My boyfriend left me several months ago, my boyfriend of four years for someone named Helen.”

“Imagine naming your baby Helen. She comes out and oh! You think, she’s definitely a Helen.”

“My thought exactly,” I said.

“Rom-coms, eh?”

“Rom-coms. I’m a sucker, I know. I can’t even say I watch them ironically anymore either.”

“No one’s asking you to.” We’d been shouting, but you said this quietly and somehow I could still hear you. The neighborhood was quiet; it’d been quiet for quite some time. In the early morning hours you could make out a nearby owl hooting, other birds calling for each other. I sighed, slumping lower in my seat. What kind of new mating call or new costume would I have to adorn to meet someone else now? As backward as it was, I was still depending on someone to make me whole and happy. Alone, I felt like a black hole, like negative space; a deep well had opened inside me and I was afraid of how deep it was, and just how far inside myself I was disappearing. I stood from the table and opened the door. “Hey, wait! Hang on. What about them?” he said.

“What?”

“What is it you like about rom-coms?”

“Well,” I was having a hard time forming thoughts; my brain and limbs had begun to feel syrupy and cottony from the wine and my empty stomach. “There are really brilliant, small moments in each of them I like. For example, in Say Anything, when they’re on the plane at the end going to England together, they’re completely unsure of their future together, and she’s afraid of flying. So John Cusack, with his arm around her, tells her everything is going to be okay once she hears the ding. Most crashes happen in the first ten minutes of take-off, so once you hear the ding, that means everything is okay. And the screen goes black and you hear the ding and it’s like the film is larger than just a movie, it’s the universe telling you, the viewer, that everything is going to be okay. There’s no way of knowing in real life of course, there’s no ding, but for most of my adult life I’d say I’ve just been waiting to hear that bloody ding.”

“That’s, that makes a lot of sense,” you said. I nodded and crept back inside, closing the door behind me. I polished off the wine and fell asleep to When Harry Met Sally, my favorite. Later that afternoon while on hold to re-register for unemployment, I heard a cracking sound outside my balcony window. I left the phone on speaker in the other room and went to see what was causing it. There you were across the way throwing rocks at my window. When I stepped outside, you quickly picked up large white posters with thick black words that read—I know we barely know each other/and we’ve only just met/just because we’re quarantined/to me, you are perfect/I would hire you in a heartbeat/Happy Quarantine. You played Christmas music. I laughed and in the other room, the woman in the labor department said hello three times then hung up on me.

You shouted, “What’s your name?” I told you it was Mia. “Mia,” you repeated. I nodded, still smiling. “Mia.”

“And yours? What’s your name?”

“Mr. Darcy.”

“Ha ha. What is it, really?”

“Logan.” I nodded. I felt woozy from having drunk all that wine first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. I padded back inside to the kitchen where I dropped cold noodles into my mouth standing in front of the fridge. Then I bit into a hunk of creamy burrata and popped a cherry tomato into my mouth. Ah, if only Logan could see me now, I thought. What a portrait this would make—me, gorging myself on all the contents of my fridge, the light illuminating all my ripples and dimples, a real Bridget Jones—Woman Undone, the portrait would be called. I sat with my back against the cool fridge staring at the pigeons pecking the window in front of me, flapping their wings in the small alleyway. I’m so alone, I thought. I’m so alone.

I called my best friend Krista the next day. I told her about you, my mysterious, and seemingly sweet neighbor who I’d unloaded an embarrassing amount of personal information to in one interaction.

“Mia, he sounds like a murderer, a real creep if you ask me.”

“Krista,” I said. “What if he’s actually just really nice?”

“He wants one thing and one thing only: to sleep with you then chop you into a million pieces.” I smiled while talking to Krista, who was fulfilling the part of playing the sassy, skeptical best friend from a rom-com swimmingly. 

“Oh, Krista. You’re so funny.”

“You know what’s not funny? Having children. God what I’d give to be you right now. Wyoming, I swear to god if you eat one more piece of the dog’s poop I’m going to lock you in his cage. Mia, you wouldn’t believe what happened yesterday. During bath time last night, Wyoming handed me a piece of his poop and told me it was a pebble. I was so tired I was admiring it before I saw him cackling over in the tub.”

“Oh Krista.”

“You’re not in a rom-com Mia, hate to break it to you. He’s probably a peeping tom. Keep me abreast of the situation, alright?”

“Abreast? Did you just use the word ‘abreast?’ I had no idea people actually used that word.”

“Goodbye Mia.”

“Bye.”

You brought out a pink-frosted cake with unlit candles stuck to the top onto your balcony the next day. You sat on top of the table and it nearly broke underneath you.

“Full transparency,” you said, “it’s cardboard I covered in pink construction paper and glued some candles to.” 

“I love it,” I said.

“Make a wish.”

“It already came true.” You threw your fist into the air. You recited Julia Stiles’ entire speech from Ten Things I Hate About You. I walked out on the balcony wearing a skimpy red dress like Laney Boggs at the top of the staircase at the party in She’s All That. You pulled up the Empire State building on your laptop and threw me a teddy bear; I said the only thing missing was a real-life child. You said you wished you could hold my hand. I asked if all you really wanted was to sleep with me then chop me into a million pieces, like my friend Krista had said before running off the phone to deal with her child, Wyoming. You asked if you were really that obvious, then you crumpled up a five dollar bill and tossed it across to me. It had your number on it. I threw it over the balcony and said if it was serendipity, it would find its way back to me.

“That movie always aggravated me, you know,” I said.

“Serendipity?” you asked. I nodded. “How come?”

“If they would have just waited a few more seconds or turned around they would have found each other much sooner! Aggravating.”

I tried on twenty-seven dresses. You danced to “You Make My Dreams.” You pretended to hang yourself. When I said that was dark and depressing, you said it was just you being the Harold to my Maude. I was offended.

“I look that much older to you?” I shouted.

You said, “No! But it’s one of the greats, completely underrated.” I shrugged. “Our first disagreement,” you said. I smiled. You held your laptop over your head playing music. We danced to “The Time of My Life.” I faked an orgasm; our neighbors leaned out their windows and shouted, “I’ll have what she’s having.” And after an entire week of this, I couldn’t help but wonder, where was this going? Was this a harmless, quarantine flirt? Was this just a way to pass the time? Would you end up killing me if you had the chance? I didn’t want our weeklong romp of rom-com play-acting to turn into Rear Window.

I ordered in another bottle of wine, this time a merlot. I sat on my balcony and waited for you. You emerged with no cakes or dances or speeches. We were both quiet and still. You said you wished you could take me on a rowboat in Central Park, and a picnic. You wished you could hold my hand as we walked around the Met and looked for paintings and sculptures that resembled people from our lives. You wished we could get brunch at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Vinegar Hill and make our way to DUMBO, ride the carousel in the glass box, eat ice cream cones, and watch the sunset from the edge of the water rushing up to meet the smooth rocks on the shore.

“I’m so lonely,” I said. “If I knew this was the way the world was going to turn, I would have fought harder to stay with my boyfriend.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” you said.

“Are you real?”

“If you want me to be.”

“I do, more than anything. What now? What do we do?”

“We wait for the ding,” you said.

“The ding isn’t real. The ding is never going to come.”

“Not with that attitude,” you said. I sighed and stood to leave. “Wait. Tell me something, anything. What are you afraid of?”

“I’m,” I started; I’d had to really think about it. “I’m afraid that I am unlovable. That I will never be a Helen, that I will never find a job that needs me as much as I need it, that I am really just a shell of a person. I am afraid I am the black lines, the outside of a picture to color in and I am waiting for someone else to choose the colors. Why? What are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of what this rom-com will turn into; I’m scared you won’t like me.” If I tied a bunch of tee-shirts together, I could reach you, I thought. We could speak into a couple of empty soup cans on a string. We could meet outside, take a walk together, remain six feet apart.

“This time we’ve spent together,” I said, “has been the most fun I’ve had in such a long time.”

“Me too,” you said. “Good night Mia.”

“Night Logan.”

My dreams were so vivid during this time. Cooped up inside all day, it’s as though my brain needed to wander. I dreamt of snow falling and you, holding my face in your palms and kissing me through the onslaught of ice. I dreamt of canoeing through turquoise blue water and falling in and swimming alongside you. I dreamt of waiting in a plane on a runway with you, your arm slung around my shoulder, of us staring up at the seatbelt sign waiting for the ding. 

The next couple days passed quietly with no interaction. I looked for other jobs. I watched nature documentaries that made me cry. I cleaned the apartment and pushed my cuticles back and practiced frying eggs. And I realized I hadn’t thought of Jamie or Helen or Jamie and Helen together or of sending them some kind of meat basket for days. So the ding might never come, I resigned myself to thinking, so be it. 

The doorbell rang one day. I buzzed whoever it was in; there were constant deliveries during that time. There was a knock on my door. I looked through the keyhole and saw it was you. I was in days-old yoga pants and a ratty tee-shirt with no bra—my quarantine ensemble. I tucked my hair behind my ears, breathed in, and opened the door to see you standing there with a mask on your face, and gloves.

“Have you been sick in the past two weeks?” you said. I shook my head no. “Okay then, good, me either.” You whipped the mask and the gloves off. Then you said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said, my voice nearly caught in my throat. We were still standing in the doorframe of my apartment. “I haven’t showered in at least two days.”

“Me either.”

“Liar.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been planning on coming over. Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Shoot,” I said.

“Your friend Krista’s kid’s name? Did you say it’s Wyoming?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Are you serious? What kind of name is that?” you said. I laughed and invited you in and we sat on the couch and drank cups of tea and later ordered Chinese in and talked for hours and hours and although it was annoying as hell and went on days too long, there was an unmistakable, high-pitched chirp from a nearby bird that sounded just like a ding.