by Rachel Cohn
I took the envelope from him. It was thick with unsold tickets. “Thank you,” I said, trying to be polite.
“We’ll try,” said Dash, in a tone I knew to mean, I’d sooner play Pictionary all night with Lily’s dreadful cousin Mark and his new wife.
Rupert Jest said, “And please, do feel free to post about it.” He murmured, “Serena refused to post in support. She’s just awful, to be honest.”
No wonder they needed a dog to salvage their screen chemistry. The star-crossed lovers of The Thames of Our Lives had none offscreen.
“I wonder what that’s like, to not like someone you work with,” I said to Dash as we passed by huge billboards for The Thames of Our Lives on the Embankment.
I snuggled tightly onto Dash. My happy place. We were on a Thames River boat cruise, which Dash had told me was the most efficient, and relaxing, way to see the most tourist destinations in London without actually having to go to any of those destinations. (Therefore, more time for book and record stores, museums and libraries, strolling through parks and shops, and eating ice cream and English chocolates.) Within a matter of minutes on the riverboat, I’d seen the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and the London Eye, which Dash mercifully did not take me on for an aboveground view of London because he knows I’m scared of heights and prone to vertigo and nausea. Seagoing, however, was pure joy. I loved the chilly air, the wind, the sights, and especially having Dash all to myself, my head on his shoulder. Then the Tower of London appeared in the distance and I thought of the horrible things involving heads that happened there, and I placed a grateful kiss on Dash’s precious neck.
“If it’s anything like going to school with people you don’t like, probably not so fun,” said Dash.
“Do you hate Oxford?”
“Not at all. I’m just not so sure I’ve found my ‘tribe’ there.”
“Where do you think your tribe is?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Who are your tribe? Besides me, of course.”
“Thank you for not saying #SquadGoals. In New York, I feel like I knew the answer to that question. Here? Gem, and that’s pretty much it. So far.”
I love my family, but I’d probably be bummed too, if my one human connection in the place I’d most longed to live turned out to be my grandmother. If only Dash liked dogs more, he wouldn’t be struggling so hard. I said, “You’ve only been here a few months. You just need more time to find your people. If I decide to go to Pembroke, I’ll be close by. Would that help?”
I wanted him to say, “If you were here, that would make everything right. It would be a dream come true.” Instead, Dash said, “Or, you living here would distract me so much that I really never find my way.”
In my fantasy of living in England, close to Dash, I hadn’t considered that angle. I knew he was right and just being honest, but I also felt slighted that his first instinct wasn’t to proclaim extreme enthusiasm for my potential move closer to him.
I asked, “Would it make you happy if I came to school here too?”
“It wouldn’t make me unhappy.”
That was a distressingly dissatisfying answer. “Are you saying you think I wouldn’t like it here, or you might not like me being here?”
We untangled and faced each other. He appeared taken aback. “I didn’t say either. I’d love it if you were here. I’m just not sure if I want to be here. And living in a foreign country is harder than I expected. You’re so used to your comfort zone in Manhattan. Your family. Your dogs. I worry you’d have a harder time acclimating here than you think.”
“You’re saying I couldn’t hack it?”
“I didn’t say that all!” He kissed me, mostly to shut me up, I’m pretty sure. But I enjoyed the kiss anyway. Fantastic. When our lips parted, he said, “I wanted so badly to come here, but it’s not as great as I thought it would be. I don’t want that to happen to you. Just think it through, is all I’m saying.” He paused, then added, “Although knowing you, so long as you have dogs near, you’ll be fine no matter where you go. I wish I had that ability.”
And I loved him even more all over again.
Dash’s phone buzzed and he took it from his pocket to look at a text. I had turned my phone off, wanting to savor my time with Dash—and avoid the torrent of angry emails and texts from my parents about my decision not to go to Barnard. I’d deal with that when I got home for Christmas. For now … no. Happy bubble.
And so quickly it burst. Dash said, “Boomer and Sofia are in London! On a layover before catching their next flight, to Barcelona. They want to know if we want to meet up. They didn’t know you were in London until they saw you were trending!”
“Oh,” I said. Deflated. I adore excitable Boomer, but he sucks up all the energy when he’s around. I mostly like Dash’s ex, Sofia, but sometimes her impossible beauty and effortless cool are insufferable. (Yes, I am that petty.) I had so little time with Dash before I had to return home for Christmas. It was hard enough to share him with Gem.
“They asked if we want to meet them at the Barbican.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an arts place, like Lincoln Center. They have music, theater, and film shows. Cafés. An amazing library. Brutalist architecture.”
“Brutalist architecture? I didn’t even know that was a thing. What is it?”
“Exactly what it sounds like.”
“Is it okay if I don’t want to go?” I wanted a date night with Dash. Not a double-date night with his ex at a brutal-sounding place called Barbican.
Dash’s face fell. “Yeah. Of course.” But he was clearly disappointed.
“Guess what?” I hoped my alternative plan would excite him even more.
“What?”
“I reserved a hotel room for the rest of my stay. I can’t take another night on Mark and Julia’s couch.”
“Really? Where?”
“Claridge’s.” I’d been hearing about the hotel since I was little from my great-aunt Ida, whom my brother and I always called Mrs. Basil E., after our favorite childhood book. It was our aunt’s favorite hotel not just in London but in the world, and she’d regaled me with so many stories of its Christmas splendor that I basically had no choice but to book it. I am usually so frugal and when I got home to New York it was going to be an epic fight with my parents so why not enjoy a Christmas splurge while I could with my unexpected client Christmas bonus?
Dash laughed. “No, really. Where?”
“Claridge’s!”
“You paid for it? Or was this Mrs. Basil E.’s idea … and credit card?”
I was offended. “I used my Christmas tips from dog-walking clients!”
“That’s one of the most expensive hotels in London! How much money in tips did you get, exactly?” He didn’t look as impressed as I thought he would. He looked horrified.
“About as much as three nights in the cheapest room I could get at Claridge’s.”
Once again, Dash did not take the opportunity I’d practically thrown into his face to proclaim his enthusiasm for my being in London. He said, “That’s such a waste of money. You worked so hard for those tips and just blew it on a hotel?”
I spoke before I thought. “Well, it’s not like you saw me at Daunt Books and said, ‘Gem insists you stay with us!’ ”
“What are you saying? That I wasn’t happy to see you? Gem’s house is small. I don’t even know her that well yet. It’d be weird to ask her to invite you to stay. I didn’t know you were coming!”
It was a good thing I didn’t stop to think, because rational thought had no connection to the irrational feelings bubbling up from my burst bubble. “You wish I hadn’t come! Everyone in my family said I shouldn’t surprise you, and they were right! You’d rather spend Christmas with Gem. And Boomer and Sofia!”
I didn’t know how the conversation had gone so downhill so fast.
Dash took a deep breath. Then he said, “Of course your family said their Lily Bear should
n’t come. They’d love for us to remain apart.”
And now he was insulting my family? (Even though what he said was true?)
I hadn’t noticed the boat had pulled into a pier until a loudspeaker voice announced, “Last call, St. Katharine’s Pier, Tower of London.”
Dash was right. I had a lot to think about—and clearly I shouldn’t be talking because I had turned the loveliest boat ride into a major fight with no provocation. My family would all be furious with me by now. For choosing my boyfriend over them at Christmas. For choosing the possibility of sharing a life in England with my boyfriend and forsaking their academic dreams for me to do so. Maybe I wanted to go to dog school in England and maybe I didn’t. It was such a huge choice. I was overwhelmed and suddenly so, so tired. I really, really missed Boris.
“I think that’s my call,” I told Dash. I dashed over the plank to the pier while Dash remained, mute and shocked, on the boat. It pulled away.
ten
December 22nd
I’d been preparing my next sentence carefully while she jumped to shore.
I thought that was what you were supposed to do when you loved someone: If you start to disagree, prepare the sentences more carefully, in the hope that they will take you back to a better place.
You don’t cut and run.
So I was pissed. And at the same time, I wasn’t at all pissed, because I knew that Lily would never do something so dramatic if she didn’t feel she needed to.
I knew I was right about her family. Mark was just an extreme manifestation of how they all felt. They didn’t like me. They tolerated me. For the most part. I’d won over Mrs. Basil E. as much as she’d allow herself to be won over, and Langston and I had shared enough good times to feel that there’d be more good times ahead … but that was two relatives out of a community of at least two hundred. (There honestly wasn’t any way to keep count.)
Still, being right and saying it out loud? Two different things.
Same with the hotel. What I meant was: There is no reason to spend so much money on us being together because I would be just as happy in a roadside Motel 6 with you as in a fancy London hotel. If we start equating the amount of money we spend with the amount of love we feel, we’re just as doomed as the rest of the world. Which was true. But not what she needed to hear at that moment.
I couldn’t help but think: I can’t believe she thought that would impress me. Doesn’t she know me at all?
And then I couldn’t help but think: Maybe she really wanted to stay at Claridge’s with you, Dash. Maybe that’s her fantasy. Don’t you know her at all?
It was all very confusing. Certainly enough confusion to last for the remainder of a tour boat ride.
I texted her repeatedly:
I’m sorry. My point was that we don’t need fancy hotels or your family’s enthusiasm in order to have the best Christmas ever.
I’m really hoping that if Brexit pirates in Boris Johnson masks hijack this ship and insist on declaring it its own country, you will call in the hounds and save me.
I am taking from your lack of response that I am still causing you distress rather than joy. I’ll stop now.
… Except to say that I’m going to head to the Barbican to meet Boomer and Sofia and I hope you’ll be there too.
I know only the most lovelorn poets quote the Beatles, but I will conclude with this thought: We can work it out.
It was immediately clear upon my arrival at the Barbican that neither Boomer nor Sofia had heard from Lily. I knew this because Boomer’s first words to me were “Where’s Lily? You can’t show up without Lily!”
Sofia, more to the point, asked, “What happened?”
And just like that, I felt like I was back home in New York. Even though we were in front of the Barbican instead of the Whitney or MoMA, we were together, and the city we were in was incidental.
Boomer was the one person I texted semi-regularly from Oxford. I knew that it would be folly to expect him to exchange letters—I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he believed that mail magically appeared in one’s mailbox and didn’t require any effort on the other end. He was now a first-year at the University of Colorado–Boulder, and was enjoying it (after getting over his disappointment that the whole school was not in fact located on a giant boulder).
Sofia and I hadn’t been in touch much. We’d developed the kind of friendship where we knew we’d talk when we talked, and if months went by without that happening, we’d be fine. If we needed each other, we could always break the glass and ring the alarm. But it would take a real fire for us to do that.
Now the look in her eyes let me know I should be checking my smoke detectors to make sure they’re working.
“She’ll show up,” I non-explained. “I know she wants to see you both.”
“That’s why we took this popover!” Boomer said.
“Layover,” Sofia corrected with a smile. “We have three hours, then we head to Barcelona so Boomer can meet my whole family for the first time.”
“But we still have time for the entirety of London’s history?” Boomer asked.
“Of course,” Sofia said, nodding to a sign that would lead us to the Museum of London.
Boomer was so easy to satisfy. I envied that.
Sofia was much less easy to satisfy, which was one of the many reasons I hadn’t believed it when they first got together. But somehow it worked. And now here they were, after a semester of him at Boulder and her at NYU, taking it to the next stage.
I wished I’d had two years to prepare for meeting Lily’s whole family. But that hadn’t been an option.
“So did you have a fight?” Sofia asked. “Otherwise, it means that Lily doesn’t actually want to see me and Boomer.”
I felt trapped into answering. “Yes. Although I’m not sure I’d call it a fight. More like a flare-up that ended with Lily running away from me and not answering my texts.”
“Well, that’s no reason to miss me and Boomer.” Sofia took out her phone and presumably shot Lily a text. When the phone was back in her pocket, she said to me, “What was it about?”
“It was about us not reading each other well. The details are almost beside the point.”
Sofia nodded, understanding.
“Relationships are measured in dog years,” Boomer said.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“It’s a theory I came up with,” he continued. “Just take how long you’ve been together and multiply it by seven, and that’s how old your relationship feels. The first year? You’re toddlers and then young kids, enjoying things and also slowly figuring them out. Then you get to where we are, around the second year? Adolescence, man. It’s awkward, there’s rebellion, and most of all you’re just trying to figure out the relationship’s identity, right? Then around years three and four you get your jobs, you start to really work it. Hit year seven, middle age kicks in. But if you keep going, get to year ten—you’ve made it to old age. Maturity. And the cool thing is, you don’t even die when you get to year fourteen or fifteen—no, when your relationship really works, it can live until you’re hundreds of years old. Couples who’ve been together fifty or sixty years? They’re Yoda, Dash. They’re totally Yoda.”
We entered the Museum of London. Inside, London’s history was mapped out for us, and we could begin at whichever spot we wanted. A guard warned us we only had a half-hour until the museum closed.
“The fire!” Boomer cried out. “I want to see the Great Fire, and the cow that caused it.”
“I think that was the Chicago fire,” I told him.
“Maybe they were all caused by cows,” Boomer countered. “The Chicago cow was the only one stupid enough to get caught.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded.
Boomer headed Fire-ward, which gave me and Sofia more of a chance to talk.
“I can’t believe the two of you are still together,” I said. “It makes no sense.”
Sofia laughed. “The same could be
said of you and Lily.”
“Well, maybe Lily and I aren’t going to end up together. Maybe we’re mismatched.”
“No, no, no,” Sofia said. “A mismatch is the only kind of match that’s worth making. Surely you know that by now. Are Boomer and I alike? Not at all. Are you and Lily practically the same person? Oh, no. And thank god for that. A match is two separate things coming together. Otherwise you’re not a match, you’re … a set. Two identical spoons. Boring.”
“Haven’t you found it hard, though? Especially being so far away?”
“I miss him a lot. And we text and talk all the time, so he never feels that far. But I’m also happy to have some distance, to feel that I’m becoming myself without having to worry if the relationship is exerting too much influence. It’s good to have each other, but you also need to have your own people, your own experiences.”
“And you feel you’ve gotten that?”
“To some degree. I mean, it’s always to some degree, isn’t it? Hopefully being in love takes you out of the realm of all or nothing. But, yes, to some degree I feel we have our own things. When we first started dating, do you know that Boomer wanted to learn Catalan? So he could be able to talk to my family and my friends from home the same way I did. But I asked him not to. Because I liked having a language that he didn’t understand, that I could have to myself and share with people in my own way. It wasn’t about excluding him—all of my family and all of my friends speak English too. It was about making sure that there was something important that remained mine. I figured Oxford was the same for you. But that hasn’t worked out, has it?”
I hadn’t told Sofia anything about my semester. “How do you know that?” I asked.
“I’ve been getting reports.”
“Not from Boomer. I’ve been telling Boomer everything’s great.”
“No. I actually went to boarding school for two years with Azra Khatun. When she first told me how antisocial you were, I wasn’t very concerned. That’s my Dash, I thought. But when she told me you looked miserable, even in your lit classes … I knew something was wrong. Which is why I wanted to stop off here to see for myself.”
