“You’re too much in here. You want to be a poet and you’re not. By the time you realize you’re not doomed, your life is going to be over and you’ll never have taken any risks.”
“You’re paying today,” I tell her, snatching up my bag when she drops her hand. “I won’t pay to be tortured.”
I’ve always told myself that it was only a matter of time before he found me. I study my face in the mirror as I put on my makeup. Do I look like I did the last time he saw me? My hair is shorter and I suppose my face is more lined. Posey claims that I look hollow. He’s coming for a divorce, I remind myself, not a reunion. But we had something real, and surely he wants to shout at me a bit, tell me what a worthless human I am, tell me about all the pain I caused.
I suppose there’s a chance that I may not be that important to him anymore. For the most part, men are better at moving on than women. When people come looking for you they want one of three things: closure, revenge, or money. I’m sure David has more money than he knows what to do with, so I can at least stand still and be a good target while he takes the other two. At the very least he’s coming for my signature.
Yara, Yara, the god of disbelief…
I meet up with Ethan for dinner. We’ve been seeing each other for around six months, and other than David’s e-mail, my feelings for him have been uninterrupted. When I see him my stomach always does this fluttery thing other girls like to call butterflies. To me it feels more like resolve fluttering to death in my belly. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love again, and while I’m not sure I’m there yet, it’s getting close. Posey assures me that we aren’t meant to fall in love only once.
“You can do it again and again,” she says.
But, she’s broken up with Samantha or whatever her name is, and I think she’s just trying to be hopeful for herself. In the end, Samantha wasn’t ambitious enough…or maybe she wasn’t interesting enough. I can’t remember. Posey always finds something wrong with them. I always find something wrong with me.
“Hey girl.” Ethan stands when I near the table, all six feet of him.
I eye the way the fabric of his shirt stretches across his shoulders. The muscular arms he has by going to the gym four days a week. I can’t go anywhere four days a week, I’m not that disciplined. He leans over and kisses me on the mouth. Not a peck either—his tongue slips between my lips and he moans a little when I kiss him back.
Just then David’s song begins to play across the restaurant. I break free of Ethan’s lips and have the urge to wipe my mouth with my napkin. Wipe Ethan away because David is watching me. Is it David’s song or my song? It follows me around, pissing on everything—the shops, work, walking down the fucking street. I tap my fingers on the table and search for the server. I need a drink, a very large, very strong drink. Ethan sings along as he studies his menu, and as always, I tense, waiting for him to realize the song is about me.
“So I was thinking,” he says.
“It’s never good when you do too much of that,” I interrupt.
He makes a face at me, the kind a stern father makes to threaten his wily offspring.
“I was thinking,” he begins again, “that it’s time to get married.”
I stand up. My chair grates across the concrete floor and people turn their heads to look. Ethan is laughing, every one of his bright white teeth showing as he throws back his head and holds his stomach.
“I’m just joking, Yara,” he says.
I sit back down, but I scoot my chair back a few inches. He lost my trust with the “M” word.
“I was thinking it’s time to move in together.”
“Oh my God,” I say, clutching my heart. “Why would you do that to me?”
“Because now moving in together doesn’t feel quite as scary. You just escaped the dreaded ‘M’ word.”
“Clever,” I tell him. And I mean it. Moving in together doesn’t sound half as scary as it would have if he hadn’t brought up marriage first.
“Why?” I ask him.
“Why do I want to move in with you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Is this multiple choice or essay?”
“Essay,” I tell him.
He clears his throat. “All right. I want to move in with you because I love you. I mostly hate life, except when I’m with you, that is. I was a mangy sewer rat before, a deplorable. Now I feel like a teenager. Up here,” he taps his temple, “and down here.” He moves his hand to his pants.
I laugh.
“Seriously, Yara. I just want to be with you all the time. I am committed. I want to share more than the occasional dinner date and Sunday stroll through the park with you. I want to have a fucking Christmas tree and Easter ham with you.”
“All right,” I say. “Top marks for that excellent essay.”
He gets up to kiss me, and you’d think by the expression on his face that I had said yes to a marriage proposal.
“Where will we live?”
“We’ll find somewhere new,” he says. “Where I haven’t fucked dozens of hos.”
I choke on my water and he has to stand up and hit me on the back—a completely senseless thing people do to make themselves useful when someone else is choking.
“Well, when you put it that way…”
“In hopes that you’d agree, I’ve already been looking up flats to rent. There’s one quite near here. I can ring the agent and see if we can have a look before someone else snatches it up.”
“You’re pulling my leg. What an eager beaver.”
But, he already knows he has me. The thought of getting out of my grubby little flat is thrilling. The thought of starting something solid with a man I love and respect feels like movement forward. It makes the past a joke if you can somewhat behave in the present. Like it didn’t really matter that I walked out on a man and a marriage, or that I’ve never managed to stay in a relationship for longer than a year. Moving in with Ethan will make me legit.
“Call her,” I say. “I’m excited.”
“I love when you’re excited,” he says. “You wear it like a child.”
I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but I smile at him over my wineglass as he pulls out his phone to text the agent.
After dinner we catch the train to Embankment and walk the short distance to a stately limestone. The Eye is lit up to a neon pink and I wonder if we’ll be able to see it from the flat.
“I always thought this was a hotel,” I say to Ethan.
The agent is waiting for us outside, looking put out and checking her watch like we’re already late. He gives her a little wave to let her know it’s us she’s meeting.
“A stickler,” I whisper to Ethan. “Let’s annoy her.”
He winks at me conspiratorially and we step forward to do our handshaking and name giving. Her name is Lucinda, or Lucretia, or some shit like that. She sums up my bag and my shoes, usually a telltale sign of a woman’s wealth and stature in the world. I’m carrying a secondhand Gucci bag Posey gave me. I seem to pass the test as she glances at it appreciatively and leads us into the building.
“This one is going to go very fast,” she says, walking toward the lifts. “Being so centrally located and all. It’s just a short distance from the Tube and there are some wonderful restaurants and shopping nearby.”
I take in the chandeliers, the heavy wood paneling, and the crisp uniform of the doormen.
“I’m afraid there’s quite a long application process as well,” she says. “Only the cream of the crop allowed in here.” She glances back at us to see if we’re afraid.
I nod solemnly. When her back is turned I make a face at Ethan.
We get off on the seventh floor and she leads us down a wide carpeted hallway, stopping at 37G. She types into a keypad and there is a click as the door opens.
“Keypad entry,” she says over her shoulder like we were too daft to notice.
The space is 1,200 square feet of perfect. We ooh and ahh as we walk through the sma
ll rooms and come to a stop in the kitchen. Three identical windows face the Eye, the Thames spread out before it, glittering like black magic. I give Ethan a look. Ethan gives me a look.
“Can we afford it?” I ask softly, doing a tally of money and bills in my head.
He smiles like that’s the silliest question in the world.
“Yes, Yara. Do you want it?” he asks.
“Very much so, but shouldn’t we look at some others? It seems so hasty to jump into the first thing we see.” I glance at the agent who is pretending to investigate a cabinet while she eavesdrops.
“That doesn’t sound like you at all,” he says. “You’re a see it, want it person. Usually you’ve decided within the first few minutes.”
He’s right, of course. I knew the minute I walked in that there would be no need to look further.
“I suppose I’m trying to be responsible,” I tell him. “Not so hasty.”
“No. Don’t change. The way you’re sure about everything makes me sure too.”
“All right then,” I say, looking at Lucinda. “We’ll take it.”
She nods.
“So how did you two meet?” she asks as she pulls an application from the folder she’s holding.
“I was working the corner,” I said. “I had a brown wig on that day and he picked me up in his convertible and took me to a hotel to fuck me. We just hit it off, you know? Been together ever since.”
Ethan’s eyes are wide, his hands shoved in his pockets. I don’t know if he wants to laugh or chastise me, but he plays along, nodding his head.
Lucinda looks from one of us to the other, her doughy face strained. It’s like the dumb bitch has never seen Pretty Woman.
“Thank you,” Ethan says, breaking the silence. He pulls the application from her fingers. I shrug and wander over to the window to watch the Eye in her slow rotation.
It’s time to stop waiting, isn’t it? To be ready. For life to start. I’m not even sure what I was waiting for. Very soon I will see David, and then I can say a proper goodbye and get on with my life. He deserves that and I do as well. I made mistakes in my youth, but it is time to move forward.
Ethan and I take the flat. Or we fill out an application and turn it in with our twenty quid, hopeful and positive. He is positive because he wants the flat. I am positive because I want to want the flat.
When Posey questions my lackluster enthusiasm I freak out on her.
“Oh my God! I want the flat, I freaking want the flat, all right?”
“But, do you want the flat alone or with Ethan?” she asks me.
I have to think about that one for a minute.
“You’re evil,” I tell her. “And I hate you.”
“It’s okay to be you, Yara,” she says. “The people who love you will work with your shortcomings, not against them.”
“What does that even mean?” I ask her.
“If you’re in a relationship with Ethan, you should feel comfortable enough telling him that you’re freaked.”
“If I tell him I’m freaked, he will get freaked,” I say.
“Then he’s not strong enough for you, is he?”
I give her a dirty look as she moves the subject on to something else. Harrods. She’s talking about Harrods. Posey is two extremes. She’s either too deep or too shallow. There is no grey area, no middle anything. It’s exhausting being with her because you’re either listening to asinine shit you don’t care about or she’s tearing your psychology apart and making you cry.
Who is really equipped to deal with someone else’s reality? It’s why we’re all so afraid to show ourselves, the vulnerability of being left once our truth is discovered. Also there is no way I’d date me. If I were a man I’d date another man. Men cry less than women.
Ethan and I are at a cafe one afternoon having lunch when he tells me the agent has left a voice message on his phone. We press our faces close together so we can listen at the same time, and he holds the phone between us. She informs us in her hoity-toity voice that we got the flat.
“Congratulations,” she says. “It will be a lovely place for you to begin your…er…lives together.”
“She sounds quite surprised,” I say to Ethan, pulling away to look at him.
He smirks and shushes me as she rattles off the address where we’re to drop off our deposit check. I laugh as soon as he sets down his phone.
“She thinks I’m a prostitute,” I say. “She hates that we got it!”
“Former, my love. You gave up that lifestyle to be with me. I can’t believe we got it. Fate, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” I say.
I reach for my glass of wine, already imagining where I’ll put my record player and my small collection of potted plants. Ethan is so happy he orders a bottle of champagne to celebrate. I hold my glass and smile, smile, smile.
I’m on autopilot; there are things to be done so I do them. I turn in my notice and carry home an armload of boxes to start packing. Ethan texts me pictures of dining tables and bookcases he finds online. I like white and he likes wood, so we settle in the middle and buy grey. I am euphoric, so into this shit. I imagine mornings in the spacious kitchen, cooking breakfast with a view of central London before me. I can almost smell the coffee brewing around my perfect life. The coffee brewing brings back a long suppressed memory and I move it away. Be gone, memory! I have a beautiful, centrally located flat!
I hum as I tape the boxes and wrap my things in newspaper. I don’t have much, mainly books and a few records I brought with me from the States. You’d think they’d remind me of David, but they don’t, they just remind me of me. Our move-in date isn’t for another four weeks, but I have to shave down my belongings, decide what comes with for my new, domesticated couples life. It’s not a marriage, but it’s close, the joining of belongings and lives, the determination to merge existence with another human being.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m on the verge of committing in a big way—a bigger way than I’ve done in ages—but I find David’s face in my mind. His smile, and his eyes, and his laugh, which always seemed to be directed at me. I’d liked being laughed at by David. He found me effortlessly amusing. I do what a woman in my position shouldn’t do, but often does anyway—I make comparisons between Ethan and David.
They are very different, but also very similar. Ethan’s playfulness and self-deprecating jokes remind me of David. But, Ethan is a businessman. He was a womanizer by choice, seeking out the ones he wanted to sleep with—or in my case—be in a relationship with. Women just fell all over David without him having to ask, and he dealt with it all in good humor. It almost bored him. He was committed to the music, and he’d been committed to me. Perhaps that was the highest praise I’d ever received. Ethan is more set in his ways, a contractual man who likes to have everything in order. David was an artist, there was no order. I love Ethan, but in a different way than I’d loved David. Perhaps it’s because I’m a different person than I was three years ago. As you age, your propensity to love changes and evolves with your personality. You gain in either selfishness or selflessness. What I do know is that I didn’t give David what I could have…I wasn’t able. And now we’ll never know what we might have been together.
That’s why I’m determined to make things work with Ethan. I won’t play games. I won’t flake. I will be good to him. And besides, I’ve never felt quite like this before. Ethan isn’t as good and isn’t as bad as the men I’ve dated before. He lies somewhere in the middle, which cushions all of my needs and gives me some assurance that I’ve broken free of all of my daddy issues. Who did I compare men to before David? There’s been a man I’ve run out on in every city, and yet none of them have been worth a fond remembrance.
I check the calendar for the date. My meeting with David is two weeks away. There’s a distant throb in my heart when I think about it, but I push it away and focus on here and now. My life is good. There is a doting boyfriend and a buffet of possibility sprea
d out in front of me. I will not be arriving at my meeting with David as some lonesome girl, empty-handed and speckled with regret. I am moving forward. No, I am charging forward.
I accumulate wrongs. There’s never one big thing. One big thing could happen and I’d move right past it like it didn’t. But those little wrongs, my God, I collect those. I can look back now and see what a hoarder I’d been in my relationship with David. What we had was almost too good and I needed to sabotage it before it sabotaged itself. At least I kept control that way. Even as I pack my things into boxes readying myself to start a life with a new man, and even as I mentally prepare to see the man I left behind, I replay those last months in Seattle over and over.
In the weeks prior to our wedding, I rose up against David. He never had a chance and that’s the truth. I rose like a wave and he was a ship, and I just kept collecting wrongs and climbing higher. It’s sink or swim when you’re on that ship, and I don’t know if he would have fallen to the bottom of the ocean or showed off his breaststroke because I didn’t stay to see. He talked me down, most days—rationalized, assured, loved. He did everything the right way, but my wave was growing.
I showed up for the wedding, I give myself credit for that even if everyone else does not. I wore my dress with the splash of blood on its hem, and I held my flowers and walked down the aisle in a quaint little church. David was so beautiful he made my eyes hurt. He wore a blue velvet suit over a white shirt. His shoes were black snakeskin. Iridescent when you looked at them closely. I didn’t feel the trepidation until after we were married. Isn’t that something? With the rings securely on our fingers, the contract signed, we went to the hotel after the small party and just looked at each other. David liked to say “my wife.” He said it every chance he got. But, it felt like an accusation to me. How was I to be a wife? How was I to deal with not just one Petra, but thousands of Petras? I didn’t have the strength. And then, about four weeks into our wedded life, I stared to wonder if he was up for the taking? When he realized who I was, wouldn’t he turn to another woman for comfort? I collected the looks Petra gave him, and I wondered if I married him to own the looks he gave in return.
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