Jess calls me back that afternoon and says, “Let’s go out tonight.” “I can’t,” I say. “I have to go to the gym and run a couple of nine-minute miles, thank you very much.”
“You’re not going to the gym tonight.”
“I’ve heard exercise makes you feel better,” I say, thinking that I’ve never really found that to be the case. More often, I find it to be frustrating when several consecutive workouts yield no visible results.
Jess says, “You need a few drinks.”
I am tempted, but a few drinks with Jess almost never means a few drinks. Especially when one of us is dealing with any sort of upsetting professional, personal, or familial episode. It usually means a few drinks and then a long dinner and then a few more drinks. And then, if the tragedy is great enough, there is dancing at the cheesiest bridge-and-tunnel club Jess can dig up for us. It actually can be very therapeutic so I’m tempted to cave, but I consider the hangover that I will have tomorrow and make the thirty-five-year-old determination that it’s not worth it.
I say, “I wish I could But I’m too far behind in my reading. I accomplished almost nothing in Italy.”
“Oh, c’mon. You’re always behind in your reading,” Jess says.
“Yes, but I’m perilously behind now,” I say.
She says, “Tough. We’re going out. Meet me at Temple Bar at seven sharp.”
Then she hangs up before I can respond.
Temple Bar was one of the first bars Jess and I ever went to upon our move to New York. We got the recommendation from one of Jess’s family friends, a girl named Caroline who had been living in the city for several years by the time we arrived. She gave Jess a list entitled “Cool Places to Be Seen in Manhattan,” which we consulted before going out at night, putting asterisks next to our favorite spots. Temple Bar earned two asterisks. Even though the drinks were out of our usual happy-hour price range and we had to take an expensive cab ride to get to NoHo, it was always worth it. We felt cool when we were therelike we were making it in Manhattan.
One day, Jess’s new boyfriend, a funny lawyer named Stu, came across the list in our kitchen. He and Jess had one of those relationships marked by merciless teasing; it was almost as if neither had evolved past the playground, hair-pulling stage. In any event, he took great pleasure in the find.
“Cool places to be seen ?” Stu said, waving the list in the air, as she chased him around the apartment. “This thing is too queer for words. Who wrote this?”
Jess played dumb and said, “Oh, that ol’ thing? Some friend of the family came up with that Our dads work together. I barely know her. Tell him, Claudia.”
“We barely know her,” I echoed.
“Well, the only thing more queer than writing such a list is anyone who would actually save it,” he said, cracking up as he made the L-sign for loser on his forehead. “And then make check marks and notes all over it!”
Jess’s face reddened as she said, “Well, you’re the loser who has accompanied me to half of those places!”
She promptly crumpled up the paper and tossed the list in the trash, but by that point Temple Bar had been firmly established as our favorite hangout.
A lot has changed since then. As a thirty-five-year-old senior editor and a nearly-as-old managing director at a top Wall Street firm, Jess and I no longer hang out much in that Village-NoHo area. Nor do we enjoy lounges like we once did, vastly preferring restaurants where people will dare to be seen in a color other than black. But, like a song that is inextricably tied to a certain time in your life, Temple Bar evokes much nostalgia from our early twenties.
So whenever I see that lizard sign adorning the entrance on Lafayette Street and then step into the romantically lit, red-velvet, deco interior, I have a wave of being twenty-three and so poor I had to nurse one drink all night (I made nineteen thousand a year when I started out at Elgin). I also remember the way I felt, both wildly intimidated and impressed by the city, both filled with a sense of doom and full of hope. Most of all, I recall our many twenty-something mishaps, almost always caused by a member of the opposite sex.
That much is actually still true, I think, as I find Jess in a corner table with a cosmopolitan. She hardly ever drinks cosmopolitans anymore, but the beverage remains part of the Temple Bar ritual (a ritual she established way before Sex and the City ever aired). She hands me my personal Temple Bar favorite, a martini with a kiss of vermouth, and says, “How are you?”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“Really?”
I nod, but then say, “No. Not really.”
“Okay. Look. I was thinking. This marathon thing is just not your style anyway,” Jess says.