Playing Hard To Get

Perfection is easy to plan for, but impossible to achieve.

A consummate planner, Tamia had yet to admit the latter part of this statement to herself or anyone else. She loved plans, lists, steps, details, earmarks, and fine points—objectives she could use to achieve any goal she set for herself. Sometimes those steps were easy, like vowing to beat Lydia Walker, the great-grandniece of Madame C.J. Walker, in a rowing competition when the girls attended camp together one summer at Cape Cod. And so

metimes those steps were difficult, like vying for the number-one spot in her law school class at NYU. Paradoxically, Tamia was usually successful in achieving her plan, but the results were often far from perfect. After Tamia won the rowing competition, Lydia, who was once one of her closest friends, never spoke to her again. And her drive to be ranked number one in her law school class led to an abuse of sleep deprivation drugs and a weeklong stay in a hospital. Big and small, these imperfections faded quickly into the back of Tamia’s memory as she placed out front the success of her planning. Sure, there were some bumps, but she always emerged victorious.

On a more recent list of perfect plans, Tamia had made a few promises to herself.

First, when she made it—when she graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and was recruited by a top New York law firm, she’d never, ever set foot on a subway again.

While, like most perfect plans, this was nearly impossible in a city as populated as New York, for Tamia, it was still worth the promise. To her, it was a matter of taste and principles. Tamia loved nice things. Clean things. Crisp Bloomingdale’s catalogs in the mail. A new Hermès scarf, folded and tucked into perfumed tissue paper. The opening hours at the Museum of Modern Art when the floors were freshly waxed and the halls were empty of echoes.

To her, these things had promise and class. Beauty and elegance, all of the things she wanted and expected of herself—when she made it. Perfection.

Now the subway, the aged underground railroad system that veined the city together, seemed the opposite of everything Tamia wanted in her perfect world. The onion man, who felt a need to keep his arm held high in the middle of the subway car, his hairy underarm exposed to everyone on a ride in the breezeless chamber. The toothless obese woman, begging for change to get something to eat. The wannabe rapper, who felt a need to rap louder than his already loud earphones. The near-dead snoring man leaning on her shoulder. The panty-free, transgender prostitute. Sudden stops. Dirty floors. Graffiti. Grit. Grime. Crime. Perfection—not.

If Tamia worked hard, she rationalized, she shouldn’t have to be exposed to this cornucopia of bad scents and bad taste. Like the rest of her friends, who traipsed around the city in taxis and chauffeured town cars, she should be able to enjoy the life she’d worked so hard for. But unlike her friends, her hard work didn’t come with Manhattan or Hollywood inheritances. Her family had money. But not that kind of money, so she’d have to work a little bit harder. Which she, being Tamia, certainly did. And so far, the perfectly planned subway promise had been kept.

However, on the third day of her new life far and away from her new beau, when she’d done little in the way of finding space from Charleston other than not accepting his calls, she realized that she had a problem. How was she going to get to work?

In addition to her freed-up bank account, one of the other awesome luxuries she enjoyed as Charleston’s girlfriend was the chauffeured Bentley that waited at the front of her residence to whisk her (well, him) to work each morning. It was a beautiful treat that she loved to remind herself of when she was in the shower or curling her hair—“the car is waiting downstairs.” It sounded like something she deserved. Something better than the subway, which was what she could afford.

But on day three…Charleston wasn’t in her other bathroom, meticulously coiffing himself as she meticulously inspected her clothing. So when the sweet thought of the car downstairs came to mind, she realized the separation wasn’t going to be as perfect as she’d planned. Her car was in a rented parking garage two blocks away and even if she bothered to take the walk to the garage, it would take her an hour to maneuver through traffic and she’d never find a parking space in midtown.

“Shit,” she scoffed, knowing there was no way her new leather Prada heels would survive a minute in the packed rush hour subway. Her Tahari suit would be wrinkled and thus out of place at her afternoon team meeting.

These complaints would sound ridiculous and spoiled to anyone else, but to Tamia it was a point of recognition, of realization. She’d busted her behind to get her things, to get to this place. She deserved better. She just needed a new plan.

“Bancroft,” she said into the phone when the concierge downstairs answered her call.

“Madame Dinkins, how may I be of service?”

“I’ll need a taxi waiting. I’ll be down in ten minutes.” She counted two twenties in her purse and thought it would certainly be enough to get to the office.

“A taxi?” Bancroft’s voice was as English and distinguished as his name.

“Yes.”

“But we assumed you’d be taking your customary mode of transportation,” he said with his voice lowered to a whisper. He always referred to himself in the manner of his entire staff, saying “we” instead of “I.” “Shall we tell your driver to leave?”

“He’s down there?” Tamia ran to the window before she remembered her view was of the side street.

“Present, Madame.”

“Oh.” Tamia would’ve blushed had she not been so perturbed by the news.

“Will you still be needing a taxi, Madame?”

“No. Tell the driver I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

?

It was one thing to ride to work in a chauffeured luxury automobile with her affluent boyfriend beside her, wheeling and dealing on his cell phone as the car cut through traffic. It was a big, brand-new kind of thing to ride in that kind of luxury car alone. Steamy latte in hand and seat belt free, Tamia sat like she was the Queen of Kings County. She flipped her hair over her shoulder and ordered the driver to lower and raise the windows so many times they both laughed at her indecision. And when it was all over and she was at the office, she thought to ask him to go around the block just one more time. And then she did.

?

“Curtis says you enjoyed your ride to work,” Charleston said, walking into Tamia’s office. His navy blue suit was as impeccably tailored as his timing. A periwinkle shirt and tie picked up the shine in his platinum cuff links.

Tamia was sitting at her desk, reading through a set of comments the lead counsel on a case she was working on had left on a briefing she’d approved. She’d just thought to send Charleston a text, thanking him for thinking of her that morning.