Dating Big Bird by Laura Zigman Read Free Book Online

tie.”
    “Too bad it wasn’t Versace. Then it would have been a dead giveaway, since only pimps and fags wear Versace.” She paused to inspect a possible lintball on her black cashmere V-neck sweater that was tucked into gray wool men’s trousers. “So conservative, basically. Not self-conscious. No pleated pants. No Prada briefcase. No Gucci loafers.”
    No. No. And no.
    Yet she remained as unconvinced as always. To Renee, all men were fags until proven otherwise. “Then he’s a wacko.”
    I shook my head again. “I don’t think so.”
    “You don’t
think
so. That’s definitive.”
    “Look, he was a really famous writer once. And now he’s teaching.”
    “At the Learning Annex.”
    “No. At The New School.”
    “Whatever.”
    “There is a difference, you know.”
    She shrugged. “So why don’t you just ask him?”
    “Ask him what?”
    “Ask him which he is. Just go up to him after the next class and say, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is: Given the fact that you’re
so
old and
not
married, are you a wacko or a fag?’ That’s what I would do.”
    “You would not.”
    “I would, too.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “Fuck you. Fine. Don’t ask him,” she said, clearly disgusted with me and turning to her to-do list instead. “Just don’t come whining to me when you find out he’s one or the other. Or both.”
    I would have no way of finding out anything about Malcolm for the next two weeks. Karen had forced me toattend a big AIDS-benefit silent-auction industry dinner she was cohosting with her nemesis Donna Karan on the following Thursday night—class night.
    “I need all my friends around me,” she’d said with what could almost be called humility—rare for her. “You know how Donna hates me.” So I grudgingly attended, though I spent most of the evening ignoring the speeches and thinking about Malcolm.
    Through the Internet, I had already searched for the books he’d written—
Broken Promises
, which he’d expanded from his
New York Times
series on education, and
The Bankrupting of Manhattan
—and had ordered them both in paperback. I had also done a Nexus search at the office and printed out a stack of material about him—reviews of his books; features written about him when he’d won the Pulitzer; articles he’d written over the years for magazines. Though inspired by innocent curiosity, my information-gathering made me feel as if I’d spent the week moonlighting as a private investigator, and when I walked toward his desk after his lecture, I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty.
    “Where were you last week?” he asked after class.
    When I told him, he smiled slyly. “I thought maybe after our conversation, you decided to go off and do the thing you wouldn’t tell me you want to do.”
    “I’m afraid I’m not that impulsive.”
    “That surprises me.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know.” He shrugged as if he’d revealed too much by letting me know he’d given me, and what I’d said the previous week, some thought. “I guess you strike me as being strong-willed. Someone who might, one day, out of the blue, walk away from something and never come back.”
    Or walk away from some
one
and never come back, I later realized he must have meant, too.
    “Who, me?” I said, making a big face. “I’m the exact opposite of that. I’m a clinger. I hate change. I’m always the last one to leave a job. Always the last one to leave a relationship. Always the last one to—”
    “Leave class?” he said, leading me out the door. “Want to get a drink?”
    It was unseasonably warm for a night in early March as Malcolm and I walked east across Twelfth Street and then down University Place to the Cedar Tavern, a dark old bar where all the great painters in the 1950s drank—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns. Now, though, it was just a slightly run-down, slightly seedy fallback place in the neighborhood when you couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. There were