The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs Read online

  Adam searches my eyes, but I look away. He comes closer and grabs my chin between his fingers and tilts my head until we are looking at each other. Out of nowhere, he brightens and flashes his signature smile, as if he suddenly realizes parting on bad terms could cost him a vote in a future election. “I’d love to stay friends,” he says.

  “Screw you.”

  Adam winces. At this point, I don’t care. I just want him to leave.

  “Well … bye.” Adam leans in and wraps his arms around me, as if somehow this will counteract any feelings he may have hurt, and then he turns and walks out the door. The door crashes shut, creating a bang that echoes off the concrete floor and walls.

  I stagger over to the freezer, wanting nothing more than to fill the emptiness inside me with something rich and disgustingly caloric, anything to erase this feeling of being so completely alone. But, as I dig out a fist-size spoonful of cookies and cream ice cream, for the first time in my entire life, I cannot bring myself to eat.

  CHAPTER

  six

  I look down at the address scrawled on the paper in my hands, then up again: 1774 ½ Church Street NW. I guess this is it.

  The town house, the last on the block, stands three stories high, with bright red painted bricks, a large bay window, and a yellow door. The bright colors fit with the character of the street, where the multicolored houses look like a collection of Easter eggs, their facades dyed butter yellow, pale peach, navy blue, dusky gray, and mint green. Oak trees dot the sidewalk from end to end, stretching so high and wide they nearly touch each other across the street, creating a shady canopy. There is a distinct calmness to this stretch of Church Street, even though it sits only one block east of the bustling traffic circle that gives Dupont Circle its name.

  The circle itself is the neighborhood’s heart, and Connecticut Avenue is its aorta, piercing the circle from northwest to southeast and teeming with restaurants, coffee shops, and boutiques. On more than one occasion, I’ve found myself strolling up and down Connecticut, picking up a Salty Oat Cookie and steaming cup of chai from Teaism and a new cookbook from Kramerbooks, before ending up in the grass around the Dupont Circle fountain, relishing my newly acquired loot. It’s one of my favorite ways to spend a Sunday.

  Church Street lies to the east of all of that activity, but 1774 ½ Church Street sits on a block bounded on its other side by Seventeenth Street, another major thoroughfare and the epicenter of DC’s gay scene. And yet, even situated so close to Seventeenth Street, this block manages to feel completely separate from the hustle and bustle of the neighborhood. There is a charming brick theater slipped between the row houses and a small church at the western-most end, but otherwise, the shaded street is filled only with houses and trees. Tucked away as it is, the street feels private and quiet and low-key—in other words, everything I’m looking for in a new neighborhood.

  In front of me, a black wrought iron stairway leads to the front door of the main town house, which bears a shiny gold placard for 1774 Church Street. To the right of the stairway, a narrow flight of steps tucks beneath the entryway and descends to the basement door, the entrance to 1774 ½ Church Street, the English basement apartment I saw advertised on Craigslist. I look at my watch: eight o’clock in the morning. Right on time for the open house.

  “Please,” I mutter under my breath. “Let this one be okay.”

  This is the tenth apartment I’ve looked at in three weeks. Or the twelfth. At this point, I’ve lost track. All I know is I’ve been scouring Craigslist and Washington City Paper for the past three weeks and have nothing to show for it but a bunch of apartments that smelled like mildew or cat pee or both. This one claims to be an English basement apartment with “character” and “charm,” which probably means it’s the size of a closet with plumbing that hasn’t been updated in half a century.

  I knock on the basement door, which is shiny and black and has a small peephole and a brass knocker. No one answers. I knock again, louder this time, but still, nothing. I peer through the small sliver of a window to the right of the door, but I can’t see anything because the entire apartment is pitch-black. On the day of an open house? What the hell?

  It occurs to me I may have misread the ad—a very real possibility, since I have been operating on minimal sleep and maximum stress for the past three weeks. Maybe the landlord wants to meet in his town house first before showing the apartment.

  I march up the steps to 1774 Church Street’s bright yellow door and press the doorbell, which instead of making the familiar “Ding-dong,” chimes with an ascending “Dong-ding.” A stocky man in a faded Georgetown T-shirt and jeans opens the door.

  “Uh, hi,” he says, running his fingers through his wispy brown hair. “Can I help you?”

  I reexamine the piece of paper in my hand. This is the right address. Unless I wrote down the wrong one. Which is entirely possible. “I’m here for the open house?”

  The man looks down at his watch, and his lips curl into a goofy smirk. “You’re twelve hours early.”

  I slump against his doorway. “You’re kidding.”

  Of course he isn’t kidding. Who the hell would hold an open house at eight on a Sunday morning? I guess he figured any rational person would know 8:00 meant 8:00 P.M. But I’ve lost all sense of time since Adam and I broke up. The days and weeks have melted together, where the breakup and today feel as if they occurred along the same continuum but on two different planes, like a lonely and depressing Möbius strip.

  The man shrugs his broad shoulders. “No worries. I can give you a tour of the ship if you want. I’m up anyway. Come on in.”

  I ignore his reference to the apartment as a “ship” and decide, what the hell? As long as I’m here, I might as well get the grand tour. He ushers me into the house, past the Lichtenstein print hanging in his foyer and along the shiny hardwood floors in his hallway. His home is cool and clean and smells like freshly pressed cotton. To my right, a broad doorway at least six feet wide leads into the living room, which, with an open floor plan, flows directly into the dining room in the back right corner of the house. We pass the doorway and continue straight ahead, toward an archway at the end of the hall.

  “I’m Hannah, by the way.”

  “Blake Fischer,” he says, grabbing my hand and shaking it firmly as he leads me through the archway.

  We enter the kitchen, which resembles something out of House Beautiful or Architectural Digest or my wildest fantasy of what my kitchen might, maybe (possibly), look like someday. Creamy granite countertops crawl along the left perimeter of the room and cover a large center island featuring a six-burner Viking range and a breakfast bar. A stainless steel hood descends from the ceiling like an intergalactic transporter, hovering over the stove top. To the right, an open entryway leads into the dining room, allowing for an open flow from the living room into the dining room and finally into the kitchen. There’s a double oven to my left, a SubZero refrigerator to my right, a wine cooler along the back wall, and a backsplash made of translucent gray tile. I take slow, deep breaths to keep myself from gasping or crying because, quite honestly, I’d like to do both.

  I caress the smooth granite counter with my hand and imagine myself standing in front of this stove, caramelizing onions while I wait for the cookies in the top oven to finish baking and for the beef tenderloin in the lower oven to reach a perfect medium rare. The house is filled with the smells of toasted brown sugar and onions and rosemary, and I call to my gorgeous boyfriend in the next room, who runs in and scoops me off my feet and twirls me around before putting me down and kissing me and presenting me with a new puppy, one that looks exactly like the dog in those toilet paper commercials. I tell him he shouldn’t have, and he says of course he should have because I am amazing, and I deserve all the happiness in the world. Surely not all the happiness in the world? But he tells me yes, all the happiness in the world. Because I am that special.

  And then I wake up.

  “Can I get you so
mething to drink?” Blake asks.

  I clear my throat and nod, my fingers still fondling his counter-top. “That would be great. Your kitchen is gorgeous, by the way.”

  He removes two Duralex glasses from one of the cupboards. “Thanks. After nine months, the renovations are finally finished.” He rolls his eyes. “Contractors.”

  “Ha,” I say. “Tell me about it.” I say this because it sounds right, not because I have any idea what I’m talking about. I’ve never renovated anything in my life, unless you count my Barbie playhouse when I was six, and I did that myself.

  And, frankly, I can’t imagine owning a town house, much less renovating one. That’s something adults do, people who have careers and nest eggs, people who buy wrinkle creams and wear sensible shoes. None of those descriptors apply to me. And yet, at twenty-six, aren’t I an adult? I’m not a girl anymore; that much I know. But a woman? No, that doesn’t sound right either. Women don’t have parents who swoop in to fix all their problems. Women know what they want out of life. Women have direction.

  Blake, on the other hand, is definitely an adult—a youngish adult, maybe thirty-five, but an adult nonetheless. He has a few wrinkles around his eyes, a receding hairline, a mortgage, and a contractor, all attributes that scream adult, adult, adult. How long do I have until I reach his stage of life? Nine years? Ten? Somehow I doubt I’ll have a mortgage or a contractor by then, though whether or not I’ll have wrinkles and alopecia is still up for grabs.

  Blake hands me a glass of water, almost dropping it as he hands it to me. “Whoa—hot potato!” He blushes. “Why don’t we go downstairs so I can show you around?”

  He leads me outside and escorts me down the steps to the basement door, which he informs me is one of two entrances to the apartment, both of which lead to the outside; there are no stairs connecting the basement to his part of the house. I follow him into the darkened basement, and he flicks on the light.

  “Here you have it,” he says.

  I swivel my head to take in the entire apartment: a small room with beige Berber carpet and white walls in a space slightly larger than Mark’s office. The crisp and slightly chemical scent of fresh paint permeates the room. There is a tiny kitchen in the corner with an oven, a sink, and a narrow refrigerator; it is smaller than my parents’ powder room.

  “It definitely has … character,” I say.

  “It looks small, but you can fit the basics in here—a bed, a couch, and a dresser. Depending on how you arrange things, you could even fit a queen in here. It would be tight, but doable.”

  Not a problem, I think. Adam owns all the furniture in our apartment, and thus none of it will be coming with me.

  “And if you like the outdoors …”

  Blake opens the door leading to the backyard. Well, “yard.” It’s more like a patio with a few tufts of grass. But it does have a small vegetable garden and a grill. I could do worse.

  We walk along the back patio, half of which is covered by a large wooden deck that connects to his kitchen upstairs.

  “I’ve had some issues with the gutters in the past,” he says, pointing up to the rainspout, “but I think I fixed the problem.” He smiles. “At least I hope so.”

  I trail behind him as we go back inside to check out the bathroom (tiny) and closets (even tinier). He follows me as I inspect all of the surfaces (cracked laminate countertop, mildly dingy sink), as well as the locks on the front and back entrances.

  “This neighborhood is really safe,” he says as I inspect the dead bolt on the back door.

  “I know, but with two entry points …”

  “Honestly, it’s really safe here. I paid for a fancy security system for the whole house, and I never use it.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, I mean, if I’m going away for more than a week, then yeah, I use it. But anything less than that and I don’t bother. You’ll be safe down here. I promise.”

  Once I’ve checked the doors and inspected the heating vents, Blake suggests we leave this furniture-less space and go over the rest of the details upstairs—or, as he calls it, the “upper deck.”

  When we reach the so-called upper deck, I settle into the chestnut-colored leather couch in his living room, from which point I can stare directly into his dining room and out his back windows. Blake sits across from me in a plush, beige recliner, pressing his back into the cushion and resting his ankle on his knee. His face reminds me a little of a chipmunk’s—wide at the temples, narrow at the chin, with big eyes and a buttonlike nose.

  “So,” Blake says, “what brings you to the area?”

  “I’ve lived here for three years, actually. The only reason I’m moving is because I’m being forced out of my old place.”

  “Could I ask why? Sorry to pry, but as a landlord I have to ask.”

  “I’m not being evicted or anything, if that’s what you mean. It’s a long story involving a live-in boyfriend and a breakup.”

  “Ah, gotcha. Sorry.” He scratches one of his ruddy cheeks. “So … where are you from originally?”

  “Philadelphia. The suburbs, technically.”

  “Cool. My dad grew up in Philly.” He pauses and loses himself in a thought, as if he is looking at me and through me at the same time. “My grandpa still lives there.”

  “Oh. That’s nice.” I’m not sure how I’m supposed to respond. He looks caught up in some memory of which I clearly am not a part.

  “Anyway,” he says, shaking himself out of his reverie, “a few more quick things about the apartment. Like the ad said, the rent is twelve-fifty a month, including utilities. I’ll need one month’s rent as a security deposit, but you’ll get that back if and when you decide to move out, assuming you haven’t trashed the place. Oh, and I’ll need some sort of proof of income, so that I know you can make the rent.”

  I do the math in my head. On my $35K salary, I can barely afford this place. God knows where that security deposit will come from. But of all the places I’ve seen, this is by far the best. It’s clean, it’s three blocks from my office, and the landlord seems moderately sane. And, almost as important, the place is five blocks from Adam’s apartment in Logan Circle: far enough to avoid frequent run-ins, but close enough to engineer run-ins if I choose to do so. And anyway, Adam can’t lay claim to the entire Dupont-Logan neighborhood; these are my stomping grounds, too.

  “I’m anxious to rent this place out,” Blake says. “We’re still in the August recess, and I have to head back to my congressman’s district next week. The sooner I can secure a tenant, the better.”

  “You work on the Hill?”

  He nods. “Communications director.”

  “For …?”

  “Congressman Holmes,” he says. I stare at him blankly. “Florida’s eleventh district? Big on immigration?”

  “I’m not really up to speed on the immigration debate. Sorry. Is he up for reelection or something?”

  “Congressmen are always up for reelection.” He smiles. “But no, this is an off year. He isn’t on the ballot again until next year. But given the political climate, we’re holding a bunch of town halls on immigration reform, so I’m going to be in Tampa for most of the time between now and Labor Day. If you want the apartment, I’ll give you first dibs, but you have to let me know in the next twelve hours. After that, it’ll be available to anyone at the open house.”

  I jump up from the couch and extend my hand toward Blake. “No need to wait. I’ll take it.” I grab Blake’s hand and, taking a cue from Martin Prescott, shake it firmly.

  He smirks. “Okay then, Ms....”

  “Sugarman.”

  “Sugarman. Sweet.” He chuckles, apparently amused by his own joke, which tells me everything I need to know about this guy’s sense of humor. He lets go of my hand and gives me a sailor’s salute. “Welcome aboard,” he says. “How soon can you move in?”

  “I’d like to board ASAP, if that’s okay.” Why we are speaking like sailors I do not know, but I am now partic
ipating in Blake’s awkward nautical metaphor. I sound like an idiot.

  “If you can get me the paperwork by this afternoon, I can run a credit check and work on getting you in by Saturday. Cool?”

  “Cool.”

  He shakes my hand a final time and smiles. “Well … anchors aweigh,” he says with a wink.

  Shiver me fucking timbers. What have I gotten myself into?

  CHAPTER

  seven

  After two weeks of blissful peace and calm in my new apartment, I awake the Tuesday morning after Labor Day to what sounds like an earthquake rumbling over my head.

  I sit straight up, my eyes cast at the ceiling. Thump. Thump. Thump, thump, thump!

  What the …?

  Thump!

  Either my landlord is back from the congressional recess, or an elephant is stomping through his living room. As someone hoping for a prolonged period of undisturbed sleep, I am kind of hoping for the latter. Also, it would be pretty cool to see a live elephant in the middle of our nation’s capital.

  I collapse back onto my pillow as the thumping increases in its intensity, all of it seemingly concentrated directly above my head.

  “Shut uuuuuup,” I groan into my pillow. But Blake (or maybe the elephant?) does not shut up, and so I let out a resigned grunt and roll out of bed—or, rather, out of AeroBed, since I no longer own a bed and cannot afford a new one. At this point, the only “furniture” in my entire apartment is this air mattress and an oversize beanbag. I’ve been scouring Craigslist and Freecycle for a dresser, but I don’t have one yet, so for now my clothes sit in the closet, in boxes, or in small piles around the periphery of the room. I’ve tried to make the place look like less of a crack den, but my progress has been minimal.

  Moving out of Adam’s apartment was generally traumatic and terrible, or at least as traumatic and terrible as disentangling your life from someone else’s is bound to be. I couldn’t afford movers, and since I wasn’t bringing any furniture with me, I didn’t really need them. But I don’t own a car, so moving day involved me carrying box after box the five blocks from my old apartment to my new one, alone. Adam offered to help, saying it would give us “closure,” but I basically told him to get lost. The only closure I want at this point is the closure of a door in his face—his and his sometime roommate Millie’s.