I feel sick just saying it out loud.
Vanessa laughs and reaches over to squeeze my hand.
“See, just like that, we’ve changed your destiny.”
16
Though Seattle natives swear that it doesn’t rain in the summer, it is, in fact, damp and drizzly the entire next day, which is just as well because I’m too sore to move. Vanessa decamps to the hotel lobby to start writing, and I loiter in bed, mostly dodging Raina’s phone calls but also dodging life
I have gotten what I know about Oliver’s situation from TMZ and Page Six, and I can’t tell if it’s because he’s my brother and I trust him or if it’s because he pulls off doe-eyed innocence so well (“Namaste, my friends”) or if it’s just because my dad has brainwashed me to conclude that what is meant to be will be, but I believe Oliver’s claim of naiveté. I believe him when he stands next to Raina and a publicist I didn’t even realize he had (“Ollie has a publicist?” I text Raina), as they hold court outside Yogiholics, and Ollie rubs his prayer beads and says in a very calm but totally unpatronizing voice that he doesn’t believe in capitalism and if anyone is the victim here, it is him, his practitioners and the other devoted few who were also duped by Yogi Master Dari when he asked them to donate to his cause.
It’s true that the right thing, not just the easy thing, would be to go back to New York. Yes, to fly back immediately, even though I can offer no real counsel. Maybe I could offer my siblings some comfort, but truth told, they hadn’t exactly enveloped me with sympathy when my own life fell apart. Raina slipped me a bottle of Xanax while I was packing, and Oliver stuffed a “healing necklace,” whatever that is, in my toilet kit. But those aren’t exactly the pillars of support that one’s looking for when one finds herself at rock bottom.
There’s a knock on the hotel room door and a muffled voice calls out:
“Room service.”
Vanessa had mentioned that she’d send up breakfast, so I limp my way out of bed, my hamstrings creaking, my lower back explosive, the space between my shoulder blades a minefield. I try to pull on my sweats but it just isn’t worth the agony of bending over, so I wrap the hotel robe around me in a loose knot and shuffle to the door.
I shouldn’t have quit those Sunday runs with Shawn, I think. Maybe I can start running again. Email him and tell him we should start running again. Rewrite our Master Universe Way together. Program our Together To-Do! app for tri-weekly runs. That seems nice. That seems lovely.
I know that I claimed that we mutually decided running wasn’t worth it. But really, it was me. We were married now, who needed to stay in shape? Wasn’t it so much better to honor Sunday as God intended? As a day of rest? Shawn pointed out here that he didn’t realize I actually believed in God, and that he couldn’t help but wonder if I wasn’t religious only when convenient. And I sat on the couch and thought about the fact that maybe he was right. But I still didn’t want to go running.
Later that afternoon, when he went out to Hop Lee for Chinese food, it occurred to me that I had my own religion: that everyone in my family had been indoctrinated into the cult of Richard Chandler, and believing in that (or disbelieving, if you were Raina) was enough. It was already exhausting to spend your days rationalizing and theorizing and putting everything in its logical place, so if I didn’t believe in God, actual God, well, who could blame me? My dad was God. That’s what everyone had told me, anyway.
“Room service!” the man echoes again.
“Coming,” I say, hoping for greasy eggs, which remind me of Shawn, so I reconsider and pray for Belgian waffles.
I unlatch the lock.
I look for the food cart, but there’s no food cart.
It’s Theodore. (Of course.)
“Sorry,” he says. “I had to.”
“You really didn’t,” I say. “You really shouldn’t have.”
He takes an arm out from behind his back and holds out a plate of waffles.
I shake my head. (He’s the founder of Y.E.S., for God’s sake.)
So he smiles. “Come on. Give a guy a break.”
So I smile back. “Fine. Only because I’m starving.”
—
One night, early in our relationship, Shawn and I were waiting on the popcorn line for the new Batman. He knew the guy who had done some of the special effects, so he was talking quickly, excitedly, about what we were about to witness. Two girls in line behind us overheard and interjected and said:
“Like, that’s so awesome! You know someone who worked on this movie?”
And as the line crept forward, Shawn beckoned them into the conversation, still spilling his secrets, and the two girls inched closer to him, and I was pushed ever so slightly further away.
Eventually, we bought our popcorn and sodas, and they bought their Red Vines and whatever, and on the way back to the theater, the prettier girl said to Shawn when she thought that I was out of earshot, “I don’t see a ring, so you should call me sometime.”
I turned around just as she handed him her card.
Shawn stood there shell-shocked for a moment, and then he got this loopy grin on his face, and then he noticed me watching, so he gave me this endearing look, like what the hell was that about? — and then he balled up her card and tossed it in the trash.
He had been a late bloomer, all pimples and bones and awkwardness in high school. His college girlfriend had been cute enough – she was from Missoula and was sort of boring, a little dull, and she liked reading Popular Science as much as he did. She broke up with him when she moved to St. Louis after graduation. So at Batman, he hadn’t yet adjusted to his handsomeness or the fact that coders and Internet geeks ruled the world. He was still a kid who played Dungeon and Dragons with the neighbors in his parents’ basement.
Later, back at his apartment, I asked him why he chose me, though I felt really presumptuous because it wasn’t like we were engaged or anything. It wasn’t like I had a ring.
“I don’t know, we fit,” he said. “You’re Switzerland. I am too.”
And we were. So I didn’t dispute him. (Switzerland doesn’t dispute anything.)
Now, I guess I hadn’t seen it, that we no longer fit, that he outgrew me. That the gawky high school kid eventually discovers that he can go back to his reunions and make the prom queens jealous with regret.
But what’s regret anyway?
Regret, I am learning these days, is a lot of things. But mostly, it’s a slippery seed of longing, of looking back and asking yourself why you didn’t know better when the answers were so obvious all along.
—
Theodore sits in the hotel room desk chair while I awkwardly position myself on the bed, clutching the robe shut so a boob doesn’t fall out. He sets the plate of waffles in front of me, balancing them on a pillow, and then returns to his chair, a safe distance away so I don’t feel threatened. I can tell that he does all of this unintentionally, even though with Theo, it’s second nature. That’s what he does: he reads your instincts and responds accordingly, before you’re even aware of your own instincts yourself.
“I can go at any time,” he says, once he’s settled in.
I laugh. “You’re such a bullshitter.”
He laughs too because he’s really not, but he also sort of is. Then he says, “I just wanted to see you. Talk to you. But I don’t want to, like, make you uncomfortable.”
I pick up a waffle and take a bite, buying my time, assessing him, how much the past eight years have changed him, or how they really haven’t. He is still boyishly handsome; he still wears black-rimmed glasses that add to his allure; he is still skinny but strong enough for that twenty-mile bike ride. He’s grown more confident, though that was a trait he never lacked, and he wears this certainty with ease, like he has all the answers. Which a lot of times, he does. He swipes his brown hair off
his forehead and nudges his glasses up his nose, and I feel a tug of something inside of me, something familiar, something like what it felt like at twenty-one when I fell in love with him.
I push it all away and offer:
“I kind of have a lot going on right now. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
I chew for a few seconds. “Okay. That’s not all.”
“But you got my email. On Facebook.”
“Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg’s wife made him sign a contract before she moved in with him?” I grab the little bottle of syrup and try to wrestle it open.
“I did,” he says.
“You did?” I say.
He reaches for the syrup and swivels it open, then hands it back to me. I dip the corner of waffle into the tiny mouth of the jar.
“I couldn’t even get my husband to let me visit him in Palo Alto, much less have him sign a contract.”
“Vanessa told me,” he says. “And I’m sorry.”
I stop chewing and stare at him. Theo was never that easy to read, mostly because he was so good at telling people what they wanted to hear, even if they didn’t realize they wanted to hear it.
“You don’t have to assess me,” he says, and I feel my ears burn. “I mean it — there’s no double-speak here. It’s a crappy thing he did. That’s not marriage, that’s not better or worse, thick or thin.”
I shrug.
“Don’t do that. Don’t shrug. It is. It’s a really terrible, selfish thing, to up and leave.”
(LIST OF SHAWN’S FAULTS #5: It turns out that he really is an asshole!)
Then Theo adds, less forcefully: “It’s why I ended my own engagement. I didn’t know if I could be there forever. I mean, I thought I could. And then I got sick. And everything changed. And I didn’t want to be the one to break that promise that I made to her.”
“I’m sorry you got sick.” I touch his knee. “I should have at least written to tell you how sorry I was for that.”
He bites the inside of his cheek. “I found myself wishing I could talk to you then, have you there to help me.”
“I don’t think I could have helped much.” I say, sliding my hand back to the safety of my side of the room.
“Why do you do that? Why do you say things like that?”
There’s no answer for this, so I say instead, “I don’t know how you handled it. The diagnosis. I don’t think I could have.”
“You handle it because you have to. And you could have. Everyone can. Everyone does. Life sucks sometimes, but you handle it. Don’t keep selling yourself down the river.”
I try to think of something to deflect the conversation from me and my shortcomings. Because that conversation could last a lifetime.
“How’d your fiancée take it?” I ask.
“The cancer?” he asks.
“Your broken engagement,” I say.
“Oh, less well than she took the cancer. So about as well as you’d think.”
“So…well?” I smile.
“Depends on your definition of ‘well,’” he says, grinning back. Then more seriously: “But it was the right thing to do. Ending it. Short-term happiness isn’t worth a long-term disaster. I…have an entire business model built on it.”
“I bet my dad would say that it was inevitable.”
“My breakup or you and me in a hotel room in Seattle after my breakup?”
“Theo…” But I have nothing else to add, so drop it. I rip a waffle in half and offer it to him. He takes it but doesn’t eat.
“So you got my email.” It’s a question phrased as a statement.
“You know I did,” I sigh. “Vanessa told you. I told you on the mountain that I did.”
“Should I not have sent it?”
“No…yes…I mean…”
“Because I’m usually pretty decent at reading the room.”
“So I read in Time magazine.”
“So you’re reading up on me in Time magazine?” He sinks back into the chair and splays his hands behind his head and winks, and I hate him (love him) because he is so goddamn irresistible. He always was.
“I have a subscription.”
“There is no chance you have a subscription,” he says, laughing. “Zero.”
So I laugh too because he’s right: I am not the type of woman who subscribes to Time magazine. I make a mental note to at least download the app later, once Theo has gone.
“I’m glad you wrote,” I say finally. “And I know I said it before, but Theo, it’s true: I’m sorry about the cancer. I…I should have tried to find the words to write you back.”
“Be sorry for my testicle,” he says. “Otherwise, I’m fine.”
“He was a good testicle,” I say.
“That he was. And I miss him dearly.”
“Ah well,” I shrug, my eyes bright.
“Sucks to be me,” he shrugs back, his eyes brighter.
“Oh please, your life rules.”
“Oh please, m’dear. My life can always be better.”
My phone vibrates on the duvet, breaking the spell.
“I should get that,” I say. “Family disaster.”
“With yours, it always is.”
17
That Theo and I broke up is entirely my fault. I don’t know if he would see it that way, but it’s true. Maybe “fault” isn’t the right way to phrase it. Relationships end. People fall away. That’s life. That’s, not to quote my dad or anything, inevitable. And so when Theo and I split, I did indeed chalk it up to inevitability, to the fact that fate must have had something else in store. And then when fate delivered Shawn, that was how I embraced what happened with Theo: he wasn’t here, Shawn was. It absolved any personal responsibility in the way that placing all your faith in the universe does.
But eventually, exes are supposed to make sense. You’re supposed to be able to see their name pop up in an old correspondence and think, “Oh my God, I’m so glad I dodged that bullet,” or “He’s not such a bad guy, but he wasn’t the right guy for me.” But I never really found that sense of logic with Theo. We were together, and then we weren’t anymore. And I could attribute all of that to inevitability as much as I wanted to, but when I was really being honest with myself, when my brain and memory and nostalgia compelled me to google him and wonder What if?... I knew that really, inevitability wasn’t the only explanation. I had ruined things, and it was as simple as that.
Shawn and Theo; Theo and Shawn. Is it possible to love two people at once? Vanessa has said, because we’ve discussed this ad nauseam, that she doesn’t believe that you can truly love two people at once, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have two great loves. She has had three, actually, and always managed to both break their hearts but still have them, in some weird way, covet her. She was still Facebook friends with them; she still slept with the second one (Ryan) every now and then when they both happened to be drunk at the same time (and he invariably texted her for days after the hook-up, hoping they could reconcile); and I always wondered if maybe, because they were all so kind and well-mannered and friendly post-split, this wasn’t actually love. That their feelings for Vanessa were something that they mistook for love, because how could you keep someone in your orbit when she was unwilling to move the earth for you to begin with?
But anyway.
Theo and I were together for three years before I blew it. The easy version of our breakup is that he asked me to move to Seattle, and I said no. But that’s the version you believe because if you remember what really happened, you wonder if you’ll ever forgive yourself for such a giant fuck-up. Isn’t it funny how that happens? The cognitive dissonance that time provides? My father built an entire multi-national conglomerate around this cognitive dissonance, though he’d claim t
hat it’s just the opposite. That the Master Universe Way isn’t about reflecting on our past and trying to rationalize our choices and shortcomings, rather accepting those choices and rephrasing “shortcomings” as “life-comings.” I suppose that when I ruined things with Theo, I chalked it up to my own Master Universe Way: that what would be would be, and that if I screwed things up with Theo, well, you get what you deserve, as my dad would say. This was my own “life-coming,” though that didn’t really make me feel any better.
But my cognitive dissonance and my stupid Master Universe Way didn’t change the truth of what happened: the years and time that slide one memory into a different one don’t alter the honest events one bit.
About two years into dating, Theo decided that he wasn’t sure that he believed in marriage. It wasn’t a particularly revelatory announcement; he was an only child from parents who stayed together for “his best interest,” which of course, wasn’t his best interest at all. He channeled this loneliness into an incessant need to be sure that everything in life added up, and it was this obsessive need for order and logic that eventually made him such a success, turned him into the great mind of the future. He was, in many ways, the opposite of my father: rationality ruled, proof of something made it real. And though he had met my dad on occasion and had nodded politely when my dad marveled over the randomness and thus the inevitability of our meet-cute, Theo really thought that he was a quack.
But Theo wasn’t sure that marriage added up, and when he made this decision, he told me about it quickly, honestly, lovingly. We had just gotten home from Raina’s wedding to Jeremy at the Central Park Boathouse. It was a grand affair of 500 of my parents’ closest friends, with a big brass band and more tiger lily centerpieces than you could ever dream of. Though Raina doesn’t seem to remember it now, she looked so very, very happy. When the rabbi announced that Jeremy could kiss the bride, she literally jumped up, straddled him and knocked him to the ground. And when they emerged from their kiss, she held up her bouquet triumphantly and shouted, “I’m Raina Farley now!”
I had thought the wedding was pretty fun, as far as weddings go, but Theo evidently felt otherwise. And since Theo felt otherwise, I started to reconsider too. After all, Theo was a decision-maker, an expert at knowing exactly what to do. Whenever I was unsure about something (which was pretty much always), he would be sure for me. He urged me to accept my first job as a copywriter; he helped guide me away from a toxic college roommate; he encouraged me to be closer to Raina, to read more, to find one thing in life that I loved doing and do it. (I never got around to that.)
The Theory of Opposites Page 13
