“I have someone I want you to meet,” my mother said. “He’s a male model. His name is Jason.”
I was 20, home on a college break, and the home was new. About a month after I had graduated from high school, my mother had left New Jersey for an apartment in Manhattan.
This male model was my age, my mother explained. He was sweet, kind of lonely. “I think he misses home,” she said. “I made him spaghetti.”
“You made a male model spaghetti?”
Her friend worked at a men’s modeling agency, and Jason was one of her clients. I had a boyfriend who lived in New Jersey.
My best friend Liz slept over that night in anticipation of the male model. She still lived in New Jersey, and I would have to drive her back the next day. She and I slapped each other’s arms and ran to the mirror, picking at zits.
My mother shouted from the tiny kitchen of our new apartment: “He’s got a Calvin Klein shoot coming up. I’m warning you. He’s gorgeous.”
I wondered if my boyfriend might be jealous, not because he was the jealous type. Maybe with someone else he would have been, but our relationship was long distance and open. There wasn’t time for ownership or rules. I went to college in Boston, and he went to a local college in New Jersey.
We talked almost every night, and I shared stories of my hookups and one-night stands with him over the phone. I told him how I made out with a guy at a bar and explained to the guy, “The only reason I’m making out with you is because you look like my boyfriend who lives in New Jersey.”
But it wasn’t a fair exchange because my boyfriend never gave me any details about his activities. I asked him if there were other girls, other kisses, just to pass the time?
“Never,” he said.
Except there were. Friends told me about him in this bar or that bar lip-locked with this girl or that girl. I kept waiting for him to tell me. There was nothing to hide. It was distance that kept us apart, not other women, right?
For his birthday, I gave him a purple lava lamp. We had been together for two years on and off and had never said “I love you.” That night I couldn’t hold in the words and practically collapsed to my knees when I told him I loved him.
Remember the first time you said “I love you” to someone? The air rushes out of you like you’ve taken an anvil in the stomach. But he said nothing. I told him I loved him, and he gave me a hug and said, “Thank you.” We lay in his bed side by side as the purple blobs in the lava lamp cast a glow across the walls of his small bedroom.
Now, waiting in my mother’s apartment, the door buzzed.
“The male model is hereeee,” I squealed.
“He has a name,” my mother said.
Jason was easily the most beautiful person I had ever seen in my life. Short-cut blond hair. Cheekbones. Strong jaw line. Blue eyes.
“Hey, nice to meet you,” he said, and “Hey, your mom has been so nice to me,” and “Hey, your mom is so cool.”
My mother beamed from the corner.
I don’t know what made us decide to take him out for pizza. Maybe because his looks were so intimidating we had to bring him down to our level. Jason started eating his pizza from the tip in little bites.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said. “Fold it in half and eat it like a normal person.”
“Why would I fold my pizza in half?” Jason said. He was from Arizona or California, places where pizza is an afterthought.
“You would get laughed out of New Jersey for this,” Liz said.
He thought this was hilarious and folded his pizza, grease running down his chin. We were two young women, regular girls, who ordered not one but two slices of pizza each. We were not the kind of girls Calvin Klein models were used to being around.
“Laughed out of New Jersey,” he said. “When can I go to Jersey?”
Never! I wanted to say. You’re too beautiful for New Jersey!
But then I remembered that I had to drive Liz home.
“You can go right now, if you want.” My heart began to race because it occurred to me that Jason would be a perfect ploy to make my boyfriend jealous. We could show up at his door, introduce Jason as my new friend.
“I’ll give you the tour,” I said with a laugh. “We can drive past my boyfriend’s house.”
“Your boyfriend’s house?” he said. “Yeah, sure. Why not.”
As we drove, we pointed out landmarks. There’s Giants Stadium. There’s the Tick Tock Diner. There’s Pizza 46. Jason sat in the back and crammed his face between the front seats.
I was nervous to drop Liz off. Once she got out of the car it would be Jason and me. There’s a safety in having your best friend at your side, the kind of person who might talk sense into you. The kind of person who might say: Go back to the city. Don’t drive by your boyfriend’s house.
But she got out unceremoniously, and Jason hopped in the front seat. If I turned around and drove him home, the night would be over. You don’t go out with lonely male models more than once because they’re never lonely for long. After that night, I never saw him again until he appeared on a popular television show a few years later.
So I drove to my boyfriend’s ordinary neighborhood, much like the neighborhood I grew up in. Months later, after he broke up with me for another girl, my mother said, “You were destined to outgrow him anyway. He wouldn’t have been able to keep up with you. You would have eclipsed him.”
Yet there I was, driving down his street, crazed, with this model in my car, just another Jersey girl like all the unremarkable Jersey girls before me, dragging along some guy to make my boyfriend jealous. I was treating Jason, who was nothing but nice, like a hunting trophy.
Hot with shame, I changed my mind and sped up, searching for a cross street to escape.
“Aren’t we driving past his house?” Jason said. “Aren’t we meeting him?”
“We should get back,” I said. “I can’t breathe out here. Can’t you smell the Passaic River from here?”
But Jason had to go to the bathroom. I could have taken him to a bathroom at a diner on the highway on the way back to the city. The Tick Tock was five minutes from there. Instead, I said, “My dad lives about 10 minutes away. We could go to his house.”
“Great,” Jason said. “I love dads.”
A few months earlier, when I asked my boyfriend if he wanted to meet my father, he said, “Why? It’s not like we’re getting married or anything.” At that point I had already started the process of transferring from Northeastern to N.Y.U. to be closer to him. I fantasized about marrying him.
My father was watching TV in his den when we arrived. Jason shook my father’s hand and then excused himself to use the bathroom.
“Is that the boyfriend?” my father said. He looked impressed.
“No, Dad,” I said. “That is not the boyfriend.”
A few days later, while I was still in New York, I saw the boyfriend and told him about Jason. That we had a wild adventure. That I drove him out to New Jersey to meet my father. How good-looking he was. And wasn’t it interesting that he was a Calvin Klein model?
His face twitched a little, but not enough to express jealousy. Or any emotions for that matter.
When should I have known that it was so unimportant for him? Was it when I told him I loved him, and he didn’t say it back? Or when he told me he didn’t need to meet my dad? Or when he didn’t tell me that he had made out with other girls?
The cool girl act works when you’re eating pizza with a male model. Jason saw me as elusive and confident. It made him want to hang out with me for the night and venture out to the Jersey suburbs.
The cool girl act doesn’t work when you’re trying to make your boyfriend fall in love with you. Maybe he was never even my boyfriend to begin with.
“So are you in love with this guy now?” the boyfriend said, smirking.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
Hayley Krischer, a writer in New Jersey, is the author of the novel “Where Are You, Echo Blue?”
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