I was twenty-eight, with nothing but the fringey skirt I stood up in and suddenly all the years I’d spent moving from country to country seemed wasted. It was a horrible, horrible time and I ricocheted around like a lost soul, directionless and terrified, which was when Maggie’s husband, Garv, took me under his wing. First he got me a steady job, and while I admit that opening the post in an actuarial firm isn’t exactly scintillating, it was a start.

Then he convinced me to go to college and suddenly my life had taken off again, moving at speed in an entirely different direction. In a short space of time, I learned to drive, I got a car, I got my hair cut into a proper, medium-maintenance “style.” In short, a little later in the day than most people, I got it together.

8

How Aidan and I met for the second time

A barrel-chested man slung a hamlike arm around my neck, swung a tiny plastic bag of white powder at my face, and said, “Hey, Morticia, want some coke?”

I extricated myself and said politely, “No, thank you.”

“Aw, c’mon,” he said, a little too loudly. “It’s a party.”

I looked for the door. This was dreadful. You’d think that if you took a ritzy loft overlooking the Hudson, added a professional sound system, a ton of drink, and a load of people, you’d have a great shindig on your hands.

But something wasn’t working. And I blamed Kent, the guy throwing the party. He was a jocklike banker and the place was overrun with hordes of his Identi-Kit pals and the thing about these guys was they didn’t need anything to boost their confidence, they were bad enough au naturel without adding cocaine to the mix.

Everyone looked florid and somehow desperate, as if the crucial thing was to be having a good time.

“I’m Drew Holmes.” The man swung the bag of coke at me again. “Try it, it’s great, you’ll love it.”

This was the third guy who’d offered me coke and it was kind of cute really, like they’d just discovered drugs.

“The eighties will never die,” I said. “No, thank you. Really.”

“Too wild for you, huh?”

“That’s right, too wild.”

I looked around for Jacqui. This was all her fault—she worked with Kent’s brother. But all I saw were lots of shouty meatheads with saucerlike pupils, and trashy-looking girls, necking vodka straight from the bottle. I discovered afterward that Kent had put the word out that he wanted people to bring along the kind of girls who were six months away from rehab, who were in their final, promiscuous crash-and-burn.

But even before I’d known that, I’d known he was a creep.

“Tell me about yourself, Morticia.” Drew Holmes was still at my side. “What do you do?”

I didn’t even hide my sigh. Here we go again. This party was lousy with incessant bloody networkers, but—at their request, I might add—I’d already explained my job to two other guys and neither of them had listened to a word, they were just waiting for me to shut up so they could monologue about themselves and how great they were. Cocaine really kills the art of conversation.

“I test-drive orthopedic shoes.”

“Well!” Deep breath before he launched into it. “I’m with blah bank, blah, blah…tons of money…I, me, myself, being fabulous, blah, promotion, blah, bonus, workhardplayhard, me, mine, belonging to me, my expensive apartment, my expensive car, my expensive vacations, my expensive skis, me, me, me, me, MEEEEE…”

Just then a canapé—it was going very fast but I believe it was a miniburger—caught him on the side of the head, and while his eyes bulged with rage as he sought the perpetrator, I slipped away.

I decided I was leaving. Why had I come in the first place? Well, why does anyone go to the party of someone they didn’t know? To meet men of course. And funnily enough, whatever the hell was going on with the planets, for the previous couple of weeks, I’d been overrun with men. I’d never experienced anything like it in my life.

Myself and Jacqui had gone to the eight-minute speed dating that Nita at Roger Coaster’s office had told me about and I’d got three matches; a handsome, interesting architect; a red-haired baker from Queens who wasn’t a looker but was very nice; and a young, cute bartender who said words like dude and shibby. Each had submitted a request for a date and I’d agreed to all three.

But before you start thinking that (a) I’m a three-timing slut (and it’s actually four because I haven’t told you yet about the blind date that my lovely Korean colleague, Teenie, had set up for me), or (b) that the whole thing was a recipe for disaster—that I was bound to be caught and end up with no one, let me explain the rules of Dating in New York City, especially the whole exclusive/nonexclusive end of things. What I was currently doing was Dating Nonexclusively—a perfectly acceptable state of affairs.

How it is in Ireland is, people just drift into relationships. You start by going for a couple of drinks, then on another night you might go to a film, then you run into each other at a party given by a mutual friend, and at some stage you start sleeping together—probably this night, in fact. It’s all very casual and drifty and most of the initial propulsion depends on accidental meetings. But although no one ever says anything about exclusiveness or nonexclusiveness, he’s definitely your boyfriend. So if you discovered the man you’d been sharing fireside nights and videos with for the last few months having a nice dinner with a woman who wasn’t (a) you, or (b) a female relation of his, you’d be perfectly within your rights to pour a glass of wine over him, to tell the other woman that she’s “welcome to him.” It is also appropriate at this point to wiggle your little finger and say, “Hardly worth it, though, is it?”

But not in New York. You’d think, There’s one of the men I’ve been seeing nonexclusively having dinner with a woman he’s also seeing nonexclusively. How civilized we all are. No wine gets poured on anyone; in fact, you might even join them for a drink. Actually, no, scratch that, I don’t really think you would. Maybe on paper, but not in reality, especially if you liked him.

However, it’s an ill wind, and during this time of nonexclusivity, you can ride rings around yourself; you can sleep with a different man every night should you so wish and no one can call you a six-timing tramp.

Not that I’d touch any of the overgrown frat boys at this party, no matter how accommodating the system. I battled through the crowded room. Where the hell was Jacqui? Panic flickered as my path was blocked by another man with yet another jocko name, a short butch thing. In fact, now that I think about it, it might actually have been Butch. He pulled at my dress and said peevishly, “What’s with all the clothes?”