Renata

Renata Forcelli was 43, big busted and broke. These were the only attributes she could think of as she wrote her third online profile of the month. She knew the big boobs would reel many guys in, but she wasn't exactly going to use that as her headline, at least not yet. Plus she knew the broke part, and especially the age part, balanced out her breasts so that her chances were always going to be 50/50, on a good day. Guys didn't want hot and older, the wanted hot and younger. And dumb. Or at least dumber than her. Surely, I've got to be at least partially dumb to invest so much time and money in these online personals, she occasionally thought to herself. Her last date ended in a failed attempt at sex which she stopped when Nate, a Brooklyn based freelance writer, answered a text while he was going down on her. "Unless you put that on vibrate and then in your mouth, this date is over," she said as she pushed Nate from between her thighs and off her bed. That night she immediately de-activated her account. But now she was back on after a self-imposed hiatus and cautiously hopeful that she might meet someone who could actually pay attention to her instead of an iPhone.

I'm sure as hell not gonna waste these babies, she thought as she cropped another photo just below the bust line. She hated when she thought like a straight guy. She knew she was more than just big boobs, but did they?

The website she just became a member of  was Nerve.com. She heard from a couple of single girlfriends that most guys here were looking for sex, but to be honest, she was too. She'd just like it to last several months or even years instead of one or two awkward nights. And throw in actual conversation, a few romantic candle lit wine infused dinners and semblance of commitment and she'd have it all.  Plus she heard the guys on Nerve were cute. The men winking at her on Match mostly recently resembled: Gene Simmons with a hair lip, Paulie Walnuts  from the Sopranos and lastly, Golda Meir.

Renata loved her Friday nights with Billy and Cedric and his boyfriend Michael, but it was tough. After dinner and a movie, she knew Cedric and Michael were going home to each other and Billy would slink off to the East Village do god knows what with whom in clubs called The Cock or The Fist Palace. She thought he might have made that second one up, but she never knew with Billy. All she had was a cat, Clancy, who she recently adopted from the Humane Society. This was her third cat in as many years. They kept dying, due to no fault of her own. The first one, Dewey, had an aneurysm underneath her dining room table, the second, Sasha, a beautiful Maine Coon, was in the last stages of FIV, the feline version of AIDS, when she adopted her and wasn’t long for the world. She hoped her luck would be different with Clancy. He was bright eyed and young-ish and she hoped he would last.

“My first cat committed suicide.” She told Billy one night after she lost Sasha to FIV. 

“How is that even possible?” Billy asked, between a heaping mound of chocolate peanut butter ice cream they’d gotten from the Cold Stone on 9th Avenue.

“It was when my mother and father were splitting up and fighting all the time. The cat would scamper away whenever my father would come home drunk. The cat remembered the time my father came down hard on his tail as he was sleeping on the top step of the porch. 

Billy had never heard this story before, despite their nearly 20 year friendship. He knew her parents split when she was 8, that her dad had a brief but spectacular period as a fall down drunk, and that Renata accompanied her mother through several marriages, rebirths and communes.They became friends when they met working at The Bronxville Field Club, a rich and snooty private club were they worked as a receptionist and groundsmen, respectively. Billy quit his job much sooner than Renata, as his 7 til 3 shift made it difficult to get home in time without missing the first 10 minutes of Oprah. There was a time, years before she splashed her face across every month of her feel good magazine, when he couldn't miss an Oprah.

“So how, exactly, uh, did the cat die?”

“He just walked out to the middle of the street, sat on the yellow dividing line and waited until a truck came and smashed him to death.”

“That’s freaking horrible. And you saw this?”

“No, my neighbor did. She swore that the cat watched all morning for the right time, calmly sauntered to the road and just waited.”

“That’s not true.” Billy rarely questioned Renata, but this story was too unbelievable.

“Believe me,  It is. I wasn’t even sad at the time. I didn’t even ball my eyes out. I was relieved for him. He lived in fear of being crushed by my father. With the truck, he was at least in control of it. Sometimes, I wished it was me, she said, finishing off the last of the ice cream. “Come on, let’s get on the 7 at 42^nd Street, we can make it home and I can see if I still have a living cat or not.
All Billy could do was grab her arm and lead her to the train and hope that Clancy was there to head-butt her and weave between her legs when she got home, and not in a small cold heap under her dining room table.