When Steve first met Ann, he had been going string steady with his girlfriend Lisa for well over a year. They lived together, had a busy social life with their many friends in the East Village, Dumbo, Red Hook, and Williamsburg. At 30, he was older than most of their hipster friends, but Lisa was about their age, 25, and Lisa in between at 27. He loved Lisa more than anything in the world, and he wouldn't want to exchange her for anyone. Having had a number of failed longer-term relationships before he met Lisa, he knew that she was the one and only for him, for the rest of his life.
He was not much of a socialite, but rather an observer, quiet, shy even, but smart and straightforward. His down-to-earthness matched perfectly to Lisa, who was much more of a butterfly, a real artist, who would get her creative ideas from meeting lots of people, whom she'd often ask the most probing questions, about their lives, their thoughts and feelings, within five minutes of meeting them. He would smile as he'd observe these people sometimes get uneasy about Lisa's curiosity, her direct approach to strangers, which made some people uncomfortable, and often seemed to make them think that Lisa was being rude and nosy.
He knew that Lisa wasn't nosy, just eager to learn from others, eager to soak in as much of the world around her as she could. Having grown up in Soviet Eastern Europe as a little child, she was still in awe of all the opportunities life has given her since, and she often took American rules of polite smalltalk and shallow friendliness as obvious targets of her friendly rebellion. She loved to stir people up a little here and there. Steve, having grown up in Holland, also rarely missed an opportunity to poke fun at New York hipsters.
"If even the punk kids in the East Village," he thought, "play by the rules and actually go out of their dive bars to smoke in the cold rain on the street, then it's no wonder they have a President who's a Born Again Christian who believes in Adam and Eve..."
But while he'd never say these things to any of their American friends, he loved Lisa all the more for not caring if anyone thought she was being rude or obnoxious. When they met Ann at one of those $5 gigs in some downtown club, they thought nothing much of her. She was a friend of a friend of a friend, a new arrival in the city, fresh from graduate school in Nebraska.
Ann was blond and taller than Lisa, almost as tall as Steve, and her curly hair screamed Midwest, almost louder than her college sweater. She obviously hadn't settled into New York City dress code yet, something that made her oddly likeable, especially these days, when the only rebels left in the East Village seemed to be those who'd go to dive bars in suits and ties.
But then Lisa had gone to the bathroom and found Ann there, smoking a cigarette. Not the American Spirits any cool New Yorker would smoke, but plain old Marlboro. Still, she had to either have no clue about where she was (New York, the city that never sleeps and never smokes anymore), or maybe she was already drunk. As it turned out, Lisa had found her match.
"Yeah well, I want a cigarette," Ann said to Lisa, "and I am NOT going out standing around in the cold. What the hell is up with this town anyways - these cigarettes cost me eight dollars!!"
"Welcome to New York," Lisa said, "what are you doing here?"
Steve wasn't quite sure what to make of it when he saw his Lisa, a fashionably cool looking woman with straight black hair, come back from the bathroom with this Midwestern girl. But clearly, they were having a good time, so he decided to tone down his Dutch arrogance and act sociable. He was quite impressed by the way Ann handled all of Lisa's interview questions. Yes, she's started work in a Law Firm, yes, it's boring so far, no she makes more than that, no, she has no boyfriend, yes, she used to have one back in Nebraska, but he had cheated on her, no, she didn't really love him anyway, yes, she had cheated on him, too, no, she hadn't gotten laid yet in New York, yes, her studio is very small, on the Lower Eastside, and she pays $1925 for it.
Three minutes later, Ann had told Steve and Lisa basically her entire life story, finances, and a lot more, but she had taken it like a game and just laughed at them with every answer. Little did they know that they were in for a surprise, because when Lisa was out of questions, Ann simply asked:
"So, did I pass the interview and we are going home to have wild sex now?"
Steve and Lisa were taken by surprise. They had never thought of anything like that, never even considered it, let alone there and then. It was usually them who asked the surprising direct questions, but this time they had to take a bit of their own medicine.
Lisa, of course, recovered the quickest, and just threw the ball back into Ann's court:
"Yeah right, why the hell do you think we'd do such a thing?" she asked curtly, but with a smile as if she were genuinely curious to know the answer.
Ann just leaned over to Lisa's ear and whispered, "Well, for starters..."
Steve was straining to hear what she said, but the bar was too loud and crowded to hear anything. Ann just kept whispering and Lisa's face changed from smiling to serious to red to laughing to smiling and serious and smiling again. She shook her head, she nodded twice, then shook it again, then nodded.
"OK, baby, let's go," Lisa finally said to Steve.
"What? What do you mean, where are we going? What's going on??" he asked, clearly dumbstruck and confused. He could be a little slow sometimes, but in this case, he was slower than slow. He had really never thought about anything like this with Lisa, and he would have never thought that she had.
"Well, we are going to her place," Lisa said, "I don't know about you, but I think you should come along."
Steve couldn't really believe what was happening. There had to be a twist or some kind of joke the two of them had somehow agreed upon among themselves. Still, he followed them out of the bar, and before he knew it, the three of them were in a cab heading downtown.
"Don't you live on the Lower Eastside? Why are we taking the cab?" Steve asked. Boy, he really could be dumb as fuck, he thought immediately, and wished he'd just shut up.
"I love cabs in New York!" Ann just laughed, as if she hadn't realized how stupid his question had been.
"Are you scared, my baby?" Lisa patted his leg, "Don't you worry, ok?"
He wasn't scared, really, but he had to admit that he'd never seen Lisa act like this. Didn't she want to tell him what Lisa had whispered into her ear? Didn't she care what he thought about all this? And who is this woman from Nebraska anyways? And who is Lisa, what happened to her all of a sudden?
When they walked up the stairs to Ann's studio, his heart was beating fast. Actually, maybe he was a little scared. This was just too weird. Ann's studio was pitch black, and she didn't turn on the lights.
"Wait here a second," she said to Steve and Lisa.
