That's Not a Thing

by Jacqueline Friedland

  I looked up at him, ready to make some sort of joke, but the way he was staring back down at me stunned me into silence, pushing the breath out of me. His crystalline green eyes were darker now, and he studied me with an inscrutable expression. Suddenly my whole body was hot, alert.

  “What?” I finally asked.

  “You,” he answered.

  Chapter Three

  January 2017

  Lana is the first one to break the silence.

  “Well, Wesley Latner, as I live and breathe.” She stands to give him an airy kiss hello, composed and pretentious all at once.

  “Quintessential Lana,” Aaron comments, his voice laced with fond amusement, “knowing everyone who’s anyone.”

  Lana looks from Wesley back to Aaron, clearly unsure how to answer. It’s one of the few times in my life I’ve seen my cousin speechless, and Aaron doesn’t miss the peculiarity of the moment. He glances over at my face, which must be as white as the sheets draping the walls. Or totally green. Really, who can say?

  “What . . . ?” he asks, his eyes narrowing slightly as he looks from me to Lana to Wesley, then back at me again. “Is this . . . Wait, is this your Wesley?”

  He asks like Wesley isn’t there, like I’m the only one who can hear him.

  My Wesley. I nod. I can feel Wesley everywhere as he waits, now mute, at the head of our table. Feelings I haven’t experienced in years. An internal tilting, a shifting of my inner equilibrium. I’m on fire again, in a way that is exquisite torture, unlike anything I have ever felt toward Aaron. And then I have the horrible thought that maybe I cannot move forward with Aaron. Not when simply seeing Wesley in his chef’s attire, hearing his familiar voice, evokes this visceral, debilitating physical response inside me.

  “I had no idea this was your restaurant,” Lana picks up with false perkiness again, trying to quash the intense awkwardness of this moment—an impossible feat, given the circumstances, but kudos to her for trying. Even she must realize that there is no reason to ask about hosting my wedding here, now that a more absurd idea couldn’t possibly exist.

  “Hi, Wes,” I finally contribute to the conversation. I stand and walk behind Aaron’s chair to offer my ex-fiancé a stilted kiss hello. As my cheek grazes his in formality, I feel my knees nearly give out, and I am grateful to have the chair beside me—Aaron’s chair—for support. Wesley still smells the same. Like olive oil and forests, clean and spicy. Forbidden.

  I want to topple over from the pain, the relief, of seeing him again.

  “I didn’t know this was your place. It’s great.” I manage to eke out these sentences and follow them up with another. “I’m happy for you.”

  “Thanks,” he answers, surprise still evident on his face. “It’s nice to see you.” He studies me a moment longer before his eyes dart to Aaron and he clears his throat. “So, what was the question? Something about hosting a party?” He glances back at Lana and Reese.

  “Oh, never mind about it.” Lana waves her hand dismissively and forces out a laugh. “We were really impressed with the food and kind of just wanted to meet the chef. Anything to make my coworkers jealous tomorrow, right?”

  “Still the same Lana as always.” Wesley smiles down at her indulgently, and I want to bang my head against the table in shame for wishing that smile was directed at me. “Well, consider yourself on the permanent guest list, then. Any time you want a res, just tell them you’re on my list.”

  “Amazing. Thank you!” Lana looks really excited for a nanosecond, and then disappointment flashes across her face, likely because she has realized it would be completely traitorous for her to frequent this establishment on any sort of regular basis.

  “Okay, well, I’d better get back to it then. Enjoy the rest of your meal.” Wesley’s eyes travel briefly over each of us before he turns and heads back toward the kitchen, stopping and chatting with other guests along the way.

  He has left behind a silent table, none of us sure what to say. I finally turn toward Aaron, meeting his eyes reluctantly. He is chewing lightly on his bottom lip, the same way he does when he mulls over medical notes.

  I decide it is my responsibility to get the conversation flowing again. “So . . . that was unexpected.”

  “And definitely not awkward at all.” Aaron laughs halfheartedly and reaches for his water.

  “So much for my TriBeCa wedding idea.” I shrug as I wonder how I ended up in this situation, engaged to a handsome young neonatologist and panicking about whether I’m still hung up on someone else.

  Even though I know, on a rational level, that Wesley and I have no future, would it be too selfish, flat-out wrong, to marry Aaron when I still react so strongly to the presence of another man—a man whom I may have once loved a little bit more than I do my current fiancé?

  But as my mind races in about sixteen different directions at once, I wonder if I might be mistaken. What if I am misinterpreting my shock as some sort of yearning that it isn’t?

  As I take a frantic bite of my scampini, I imagine Wesley cooking this dish, his hands all over my food, and everything tastes different than before. I’m acutely aware of the juices seeping out from the slick pieces of shrimp inside my mouth, the fibers of flesh coming undone against my tongue, and it’s suddenly too much, way too much. I cough abruptly, blocking the food, pushing it away from my throat, like I am trying to keep it from entering me, from reaching my insides, possessing me all over again. I grab for my ice water, taking several large gulps as I try to wash away the taste of Wesley, swallowing once, twice, coughing again.

  I’m doing a poor job of masking my discomfort, and Aaron signals our waitress for the check. Nobody mentions dessert. I think fleetingly of Wesley’s crème brûlée and nearly shudder. Yes, it’s definitely time to go.

  “Don’t forget, this meal is on us.” Reese reaches into his back pocket for his wallet as the waitress returns with the little leather folio in her hand.

  “It’s really not necessary, you guys,” Aaron argues as he produces his own wallet. “We obviously appreciate the gesture, but let us split it, at least. The prices here aren’t exactly gentle.”

  “Here you go,” the waitress nearly sings as she hands Aaron the folder. “Your meal was comped, but there’s some information inside about special events—you know, wine tastings and prix fixe nights—if you want.”

  “Well, that was nice of him.” Lana looks at me with her eyes wide. After the way Wesley and I left things three years ago, I think Lana and I would both be less surprised if he had kicked us out of the restaurant rather than treating us to a free meal.

  “For sure.” Reese nods as he starts to stand. “But now we have to buy you an actual engagement present.” He laughs lightly as he stuffs some bills into the folder to tip the waitress.

  “Oh, please.” Lana swats him as she slides to the end of the bench and rises as well. “As if I wasn’t going to buy them an actual gift. She’s practically my sister.” Lana grabs me and gives me a tight squeeze, an exaggerated show of affection.

  I am so gutted from seeing Wesley that I just want to lean into her, allow her to do the work of keeping me upright. Her skinny arms are strong from all that time she spends at Equinox or whatever flashy gym she likes these days, and I have the thought that maybe she is stronger than I am in every way. At least she knows her own mind. I can’t break down, though, not here, in front of Aaron. And certainly not where Wesley might still see me.

  I paste a smile on my face and wrap my arm through Aaron’s as we head toward the coat check. He looks down at me and heaves me closer to him as we walk, as though he knows I could use the extra support right now, as though he will always hold me up.

  DURING THE CAB ride back to my apartment, Aaron and I are both silent. He knows that getting over Wesley is one of the most challenging hurdles I have overcome in life—although, if my reaction at the restaurant is any indication, it would seem I really haven’t gotten over him at all. There is clearly still much work to be
done by way of getting over.

  “So, that was a surprise,” he finally says.

  I just nod, as Aaron has told me several times throughout the two years we’ve been together that he doesn’t need to know every last detail about my past. I’ve already given him the broad strokes of how Wesley and I had to break our engagement due to irreconcilable differences, that he blamed me for things that couldn’t logically be considered my fault, but I’ve always spared him the specifics. He said it would save us both; me from having to relive the pain, and him from having to brood about how close I once was with another man. He insists that he prefers to remain willfully ignorant, that he’d rather think of himself as the only fiancé, not the second fiancé.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, fixing me with his dark, sloping eyes. He sounds guarded, like he’s bracing himself for something.

  I lay my head on his shoulder, noting that I’m wiped out from the enormity of it all, devastated by the newly niggling prospect that I might not belong with Aaron after all.

  “Nah. There’s not much to say. I guess he’s back from England.” I lift my head to look up at Aaron; his jaw is set, like he’s prepared to listen if I want to continue, like he can withstand whatever details might be forthcoming. “It’s fine,” I say, putting my head back down on him. “It was just a surprise. Thanks for helping me keep my cool.”

  “No problem,” he answers, as he angles his own head to rest it against mine. We lean into each other like that, and I am overcome by a rush of warmth and love, which is instantly followed by alarm. Just because I had an extreme reaction to Wesley doesn’t mean I can’t be with Aaron, does it? The fact that I once loved Wesley so intensely doesn’t mean that my love for Aaron isn’t also real.

  “So, tell me about your day, then, with Moe,” Aaron says, clearly making a peace offering. “What was he like?”

  Moe is the Burmese immigrant my law firm is representing pro bono. Harrison, Whittaker & Shine, where I have been working since I graduated from law school, allows junior lawyers to represent nonpaying clients every now and then as a sort of training exercise. The firm’s partners like to boast that their lawyers complete a certain number of pro bono hours annually. What the senior attorneys don’t advertise when they are recruiting all those bright-eyed law students year after year is that pro bono cases are permitted only to the extent that they do not impinge on the firm’s ability to assist the large corporations, the clients who actually pay the firm’s bills. So taking on a pro bono case means committing to additional hours in the office, rather than replacing one kind of case with another.

  Even so, I was energized when I was assigned to assist Moe Hre with his application for political asylum in the United States. I immediately delved in and spent weeks sorting through Moe’s paperwork, so many pages written in English and Burmese, documenting his alleged political and religious persecution in Burma. Today, we finally had our first in-person meeting.

  “His English was pretty terrible.” I nod as I take Aaron’s hand in my own and slip our joined hands inside his coat pocket to keep them warm. “Thank goodness for the interpreter. It’s kind of baffling.” I think back to the two-hour meeting. “He was very different from what I had pictured. Even the way he was dressed. I don’t know . . .” I glance at the ceiling of the cab, noticing that there are little glow-in-the-dark star stickers affixed to it. “He looked like anyone else, like he could have been one of your mother’s teaching assistants, or an intern at the hospital. I guess it was closed-minded of me to expect political persecution to somehow show on his face.”

  “But what about the case?” Aaron asks, as he readjusts our hands so that our connected palms now rest on his lap inside the coat. “Now that you’ve talked to him, do you think you’ll be able to get his status adjusted so he can stay in the country?”

  I think about what Moe recounted earlier today as he sat with me and my supervising associate, Rose Conway, in one of our firm’s many antiseptic conference rooms. He told us about how the Myanmar military ransacked his home and set fire to parts of his village, about how he walked for weeks until he reached the Thai border. He lived in a primitive camp in Thailand until he secured false documents and fled the region altogether. Although certain portions of his testimony were still too vague, like how he actually got himself out of Thailand, the stories he shared about women and girls from his village being raped and groups of men being locked inside huts that were burned to the ground were almost too terrifying to comprehend.

  Thinking again about the extreme challenges Moe has faced, I feel familiar guilt about my career choice—selling out as I have, going corporate instead of pursuing a position in public-interest law. I sweated my way through law school because I wanted the skills to help people, but after all the fallout with Wesley, I shifted my focus to finding the job that paid the most generously. My priority has become ensuring permanent self-sufficiency, even if the work in which I engage means nothing to me. Representing Moe Hre in connection with his application for political asylum is the one bit of substantive merit I can see in my otherwise dismal legal career.

  “I wonder if I should go back to Community Kitchen, start helping out there again,” I muse, not answering Aaron’s question. “It was like being delivered from darkness today when I was with Moe, finally doing something that mattered. I mean, the antitrust case is great for racking up billable hours, but I can’t say I’m at all passionate about whether one chewing-tobacco company behaved unfairly toward another. As far as I’m concerned, they should both declare bankruptcy and save all their unfortunate customers from nasty breath and probable mouth cancer.”

  “Why don’t you quit, then?” Aaron asks me, not for the first time. “You could go work for the ACLU or the ADL, or any of the other nonprofits out there.”

  “My salary—”

  “Who cares about your salary? If you don’t feel fulfilled by how you’re spending your days, what good is the money?”

  I know he is trying to be supportive, offering to pick up the slack until I find something more gratifying, but for some reason I chafe at his apparent need to manage this situation, to commandeer every predicament he encounters.

  “Look, we can’t all be heroes like you, okay?” I snap. “Just because I’m not saving infants from neurological defects all day, it doesn’t mean my work is meaningless.”

  “Whoa. Okay.” We pass under the glow of a traffic light, and the green hue travels over his face for a moment as he looks down at me. “I know your work is meaningful, and complicated, and I’m sure it matters a great deal to some people, but it doesn’t seem to matter to you. I only want you to be satisfied, so if you are, stick with it. I’m just saying, you could break your lease and move in with me early, let me support us both until you figure out what job you want to take. But if that doesn’t appeal to you, then you should do what you want. Keep the current job but go back to the soup kitchen, like you said.” He shrugs as if he has no stake in the outcome, as if my six-figure salary is irrelevant to him, and then turns away to look out the window.

  His support of my choices is nothing new. It’s one of the many qualities I love about him. As I watch him working his lip again while he stares out the window, I feel contrite. One glance at Wesley and I have begun to treat Aaron like he is disposable, which he is not. He is the man who brought me back from oblivion when I thought I might never be happy again; he is my sunrise on a brand-new day, every day.

  “You know what appeals to me?” I say, more gently. “You appeal to me.” He doesn’t turn back toward me, so I kiss his shoulder through his wool coat, feeling the coarse fabric scratch my lips.

  Chapter Four

  January 2008

  I woke up to the sound of staccato knocking outside my dorm room. Straining toward my digital clock was a useless reflex, as the device was entirely obscured by the clutter on the nightstand, a stack of DVDs, Daphne’s polka-dotted cosmetics case, and two plastic snow globes of the New York City
skyline. I picked up my phone from where it was charging on the floor and saw that it was 3:37 p.m. If I hadn’t stayed out with Wesley until six in the morning, I would have already been awake for hours, probably making flashcards about early-twentieth-century cubists for Art History.

  I hauled myself out of my warm bed, squinting into the afternoon light that was pouring through the room’s two large windows. The knocking was probably some guy looking for Daphne, whose bed sat unmade, like an open invitation, on the other side of the room. What a relief it had been, when I’d slipped back into our room early this morning, to see her alone in that bed.

  The person knocking could also have been Bina or Gretchen coming to check up on me and find out why I hadn’t been present in either of the classes we had together today. It was atypical for me to blow off class, and I appreciated that a friend might think to wonder why I’d gone AWOL. I wasn’t prepared to explain my night with Wesley to anyone yet, however, as I hadn’t even had a moment to process it myself. So, as I stumbled across the floor, I started preparing health-related excuses, fake-coughing into my fist with gusto as I yanked open the door with my other hand.

  “Finally!” Wesley raised his arms in triumph.

  “Wesley!” My hand flew to my chest in an involuntary gesture of surprise, and I realized two facts simultaneously. First, Wesley’s sculpted features had not been a figment of my imagination and were, if anything, only heightened in the light of day. Second, I was currently standing in front of him in nothing but a tiny tank and barely-there boy shorts.