by Melissa Ford
“I was sort of waiting for that,” she admits. “I’m sorry, too. It was wrong of us to be secretive; completely wrong. We should have come out and told you instead of dropping bread crumbs and waiting for you to notice and call us on it.”
“How long has it been going on?” I ask, breathing deeply as I catch of whiff of a smell that is comforting. Home-like.
“I guess it started after that dinner party you gave. I took the elevator down with the boys. Gael immediately said goodbye and walked off in one direction. And the other guy sort of lingered around talking to us for a bit, and then he went to the subway. And then Ethan offered to walk me home. I guess I never thought much about him before; he was just your little brother. But he came up, and we spent the night talking and when he kissed me . . . it just felt right. Is this too weird? Is talking about this too weird?”
“I’ll tell you when it gets too weird,” I promise. “Just stay away from talking about back rubs.”
We both look at each other and start laughing hysterically, the kind of laughter that you need to do simply to clear the tension from the room even though nothing funny has been said or done. “Ethan Katz,” she gasps, tears streaming down her face as I snort. “I’m in love with Ethan Katz.”
“You’re in love with him,” I repeat, suddenly serious again. Arianna is not one to throw around the word “love.”
She wipes her eyes with her sleeve and nods her head. “I am. Is that crazy? I don’t know where it’s going, but he’s wonderful with Beck, and he’s wonderful with me. He makes me eggs in the morning.”
“My brother makes you eggs? But Katzs don’t know how to cook.”
“He uses that recipe you posted on your blog a few weeks ago for scrambled eggs with herbs. He brings me flowers. And he changes diapers. What more can a single mum want? I think I’m getting easier to please in my old age.”
“You still have months before you’re thirty-five,” I tell her, trying to steer away from learning more intimate facts about my brother. We will need to tread slowly with this topic, baby steps, even if I am happy for her and him. And I’m not just saying this because it’s the right thing to say when your best friend has found happiness with your brother. I’m saying it to myself because it is true. Everyone should find that someone worth making eggs for, worth waking up next to, and Arianna has been waiting a long time. “You’re young,” I tell her.
Arianna looks at me with gratitude over the fact that I am not strangling her, calling her a liar for keeping this news for so long, or demanding she choose one of us because she cannot have the whole Katz set. None of those things sound like good options, though I am aware that my reaction is tempered by the fact that too many other thoughts are competing for my attention as well as the fact that she held my hair while I vomited last night. Holding my hair during a drunken puking session goes a long way.
“So what happened after you got back to the apartment last night?” she asks.
Again, I catch the smell in the air, like sourdough bread, the tang of yeast. I sniff at the blanket but I can’t find it again. “We ended things. Like civilized adults.”
“How are you with that? Is Gael the failure you wrote about last night?”
I stare at my hand, at the ring from Me&Ro. It has started to meld with my hand, to form an imprint on my finger from daily wear. The tan line from my wedding band is nearly gone.
“I know that you have every right to hit me when I say this, Arianna, considering how many nights you sat up with me after the divorce while I cried. But I miss Adam.”
“I know you miss Adam, sweetie,” she says.
“No, I mean I really miss him, and I wonder if I’ve done the right thing, and I feel like we should have another go at it.”
“Rachel,” she begins. And actually, that’s also where she ends. As if my name is enough of a statement to convey how terrible an idea it would be to call up my ex-husband and attempt to reconcile.
“Listen, I’ve learned a lot this year. A lot about myself. It sort of snuck up on me, the learning about myself. I am so terrified of failing that I never really tried to save my marriage. But this is a theme with me, isn’t it? Before I let the marriage fail, I never tried to have a baby with Adam because I was too scared to push it because I thought Adam might say that we’re not on the same page about parenthood. I never tried cooking not just because my mother scoffed at women who bother with learning their way around the kitchen. I never tried because I was terrified of failing at it. In creating huge kitchen disasters because I had no one to help me learn. I didn’t trust myself to be a good-enough teacher for me. I never told Adam what I needed to tell him because what if he didn’t listen? What if he didn’t give it to me?”
“What if he did?” Arianna asks.
“Well, that’s the problem with being scared to fail. You usually end up failing in the end by default, because you don’t grab what you want. Somehow I talked myself into the idea that it would mean more to me if he came to all the right conclusions by himself. That it would mean less if he spent more time with me because I asked him to, rather than because he wanted to. I know that he hasn’t told me in a straightforward manner that he misses me, but he obviously hasn’t moved on if he’s reading my blog and sending me messages.”
“If it’s him reading your blog,” Arianna says. “What if there’s a newly-divorced woman at the law firm who’s desperate for your advice? Remember how you used to read blogs about relationship problems? What if your mystery reader turns out to be a fifty-year-old legal secretary?”
Beckett begins his morning cooing through the monitor. We listen to him talk to the mobile above his crib as if he is asking each stuffed figure a series of important questions.
“But if I find out definitively that he misses me and is thinking about me, then wouldn’t it be worth trying a second time?”
“Rachel, you were so miserable in that relationship. Don’t you remember all the nights you sat on the sofa and waited for him? And were frustrated and waited for him? And waited for him and waited for him and waited for him?”
“I do,” I admit. “But I never told him how much it hurt, not clearly and passionately. I just withdrew more and more, as he did the same. I feel like I called it quits too soon. I made myself fail so I could get the failure part over with quickly. And what I should have done was work my ass off…” And this is where my throat catches.
Arianna returns to stroking my hair, and the smell crosses in front of my face, and that is all I need to start crying. Beckett hears me and starts his own wail, and I motion to Arianna to get him. I have a good cry in her bed while I’m waiting for them to return. She sits down on the bed and pops a warm bottle into his mouth. He watches me over the rim of it with interest, and I rub the bottom of his foot. It is incredibly smooth, like a stone that has been washed by the ocean for a thousand years.
“People make mistakes,” I try again. “He made mistakes but so did I. I need to acknowledge that; I need to tell him, then either move on or go backwards and try to correct it. And knowing that he is still thinking of me while I am thinking of him makes me want to choose the latter. The former. I never get those words right. Which is the one that means that I want to go try to fix my mistake?”
“The latter.”
“Do I have your support?” I ask. “Will you be here for me with ice cream and tissues if it all goes to hell?”
“Of course we’ll be here,” she says, motioning a bit to Beckett to indicate that they’re both on my side.
The smell again, something so familiar though I can’t place it. It is like a former place you lived, something fresh from an oven, warmth.
“What am I smelling?” I ask.
Arianna sniffs the air and shakes her head. She sniffs her sweatshirt, her hair and the back of her hand. Finally, she holds out her wrist. “This? It’s formula. Beckett spit up on my hand last night.”
Knowing that it’s spit-up makes it ten times less romantic, but I s
hake that out of my mind in order to cling to the wave of drama I’ve been feeling since my birthday. There is something about having an almost-tangible reminder of time that lays the past bare. The fact is that somehow my life has gotten off course. I am supposed to be holding a child too and be happily ensconced in a relationship. And now that I’ve picked up a few life skills and a modicum of self-confidence, it’s up to me to get my life back on track even if that means showing up at Adam’s office and placing my own damn heart on his desk for him to do with what he will.
I go home to shower and put on a navy blue cashmere sweater that I had hoped to be wearing when I bumped into him for the first time. He always loved the way it fit my body, and I agreed with him, though now, my body almost a year older and a little wider, it is different. Hopefully more like something new than like something strange.
I am having one-thousand doubts that I’m doing the right thing, but I squelch them, knowing full well that I will not feel at peace no matter which option I choose. Staying in the apartment or going. Calling him or showing up at his office.
I am terrified of the way my stomach is already lurching while I swing by the carryout kiosk on the corner, ordering a grilled cheese sandwich with avocado as a tongue-in-cheek ice breaker that I hope conveys immediately that I know he has been skulking around on my blog so we can get that part over with. The accusations, I mean. I hope to skip straight into the passionate love-making on the floor amid his legal briefs, his declarations of undying love, his promise to come home by six p.m. every night.
I take a cab instead of the subway, giving an enormous tip to the driver, as if that will bring good luck for my endeavors. I take the elevator up to the eighteenth floor, four below his office, and get off with a set of young magazine interns who must additionally be students at NYU, based on their conversation. The girls look so young, so confident. They make me want to place my arms around their shoulders and tuck them in close for a little older-sister advice session. Or at least scare the shit out of them by explaining how life will really turn out so they stop looking so damn confident while I’m quaking in my boots.
I slip into the stairwell, which is cavernously silent. One year, when I wanted to surprise Adam with a birthday cake at work, I was told that the eighteenth floor has a back passage that connects the building’s two stairwells—the public one accessible to people like me, and the private one to be used by personnel traveling between floors for multilevel offices. I walk down through the narrow walkway, prepared to climb the last four flights in order to avoid having the receptionist at the law firm’s front desk notify Adam that I’m about to descend upon his office.
As I climb up the stairs, I rehearse everything I’m about to say aloud. I’ll begin with an apology. I’ll keep it simple. “I’m sorry,” I’ll tell him, my words hanging in the air between us until he accepts them. And then I’ll state all the things I’m sorry it took until now to learn: that I’m not the world’s best communicator but I’ve found my voice now. That I should have told him not just to spend more time at home, but why I wanted him there. That I missed him when I was sitting on the sofa by myself.
But now I have that passion he talked about, for my blog, my writing. I will understand his career demands, and he will understand mine. I’ll support him with meals and homemaking, not as a bribe or a submissive role, but because I am good at it. I’d like a chance to put into effect all of the things I’ve learned this year—not just about cooking, but how to make myself happy for the times I need to be alone. I want to tell him that I now understand how a person can lose themselves in work, have hours pass without them noticing. It has happened to me with the blog and the book. I couldn’t understand it until I experienced it myself—how work can sometimes be as satisfying as being with someone you love, and how you can derive your happiness, and your self-esteem, from both.
All of this will be told to him as directly and concisely as possible. As honestly as possible. And if my heart gets shredded in the process, if I leave not with the words I’m hoping to hear, but an answer that is unpalatable, I will still know that I did my best, I gave it my last effort.
I drink up the false bravado, swallow my placebo of confidence, and push open the heavy door down the hall from his office. They’ve replaced the carpeting, turning it from a threadbare navy blue to beige, and I glance at the door number to make sure that I have the right floor. The names on the nameplates are still the same. I pass by Gardner, Finnegan, and Sharpstein, all their doors thankfully closed. I pause outside of Goldman. The door is, luckily, open.
I peer inside, first trying to catch a glance at him. I do a double-take, because since the party, Adam has dyed his hair blond. And had it thinned out. And put on about forty pounds, judging by the heft of his shoulders. And become a short, goyishe, ham-sandwich-eating-at-your-desk man. With pictures of children on his desk, and a new wife beaming from the photo frames.
And a new last name of O’Connor.
I jump back, almost dropping the Styrofoam container of grilled cheese, even though it would hardly matter if Mr. O’Connor caught me sneaking around his door. I hadn’t counted on Adam switching offices in the past year, and this definitely throws a wrench in my surprise-it’s-your-ex-wife plan. I glance around at some of the doors in the area, searching for his name.
“Can I help you?” Mr. O’Connor’s secretary calls out from her desk.
Her eyes move from my Styrofoam box to my face and back. I lean in close to her desk to minimize being overheard.
“I’m looking for Adam Goldman. This was his old office. Do you know where they moved him?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think anyone by that name works here,” she tells me.
“He’s a lawyer,” I try again. “Adam Goldman. Maybe he’s on a different floor?”
“That’s possible,” she admits. “I’m new here, and there are a lot of lawyers in this firm. Why don’t I look it up on the computer?”
“Thanks, that would really help,” I tell her.
I watch her face as she scans through the directory, and she finally shakes her head. “No, there’s no one named Adam Goldman.”
“Brockman and Young? I am on the right floor?” I question.
“Yes, this is Brockman and Young, but there’s no one who works here with that name.”
Seriously? Can this woman not spell Goldman? It’s times such as these that I wish I had a Blackberry so I could go on the Internet myself and check the firm’s website for his office number. I thank her and duck back towards the front desk, hoping that the receptionist doesn’t ask how I’ve come from the opposite direction. So much for a surprise attack.
There is also a new receptionist at the front desk, a blond Amazonian woman who looks like she’ll break my arms if I don’t answer who I’ve come to see in the building. I set my grilled cheese sandwich on the counter and attempt to look friendly.
“Hi, Lisa,” I say, checking her nameplate. “I’m here to see Adam Goldman, but I believe he has moved offices since my last visit.”
“We don’t have anyone here by that name.”
I’m finally beginning to believe them, but my mind can’t keep up with the news. If he’s not here, then where is he? Especially if he was here as of a few weeks ago. How is it that no one remembers him even if they’ve only been here for a few months? Have all the employees of Brockman and Young been clocked on the head?
It dawns on me that maybe law offices pretend the lawyer isn’t there so that people can’t deliver a subpoena. I’ve seen it on so many television shows that I can’t believe I’ve forgotten this fact. I am about to admit to Lisa why I’m there and how she can trust me with his office number when I hear someone calling my name.
Except it isn’t Adam.
It’s Rob Zuckerman of Bali-traveling fame. My first first date.
“Rachel!” he shouts and awkwardly gives me a hug, as if we’ve had several encounters rather than one date. “What are you doing here?”
/> “I came to visit a friend,” I lie. “But he’s not here. Anymore.”
“What have you been up to?” he asks. “I’ve been thinking about you. I wanted to get together again. It’s just so busy here. You know how it is. I don’t think I’ve been home before two a.m. in weeks. It’s brutal.”
“It sounds like it,” I agree.
“And when I’m home, I’m just tied to my Blackberry,” Rob says proudly, holding up the electronic device as if it were an Oscar statue rather than an instrument of communication.
As much as I can now understand Adam’s love for his job, that pulse of energy doesn’t translate well for Rob. Maybe it’s like the difference between being in love and wanting to be in love.
“What have you been doing?” Rob asks. “You know, I never heard back from you. Did you get my messages?”
“I didn’t,” I lie again, despite my desire to fill my day with stark honesty. “I’m so sorry. I wondered why I hadn’t heard from you. Well, now I know. I have to get my stupid phone fixed.”
“Well, maybe we could go out this weekend,” Rob says. “If you’re not busy working on your book.”
“I am, actually. I’m pretty busy working on something right now.”
“Well, maybe another time?” Rob says, looking at his Blackberry again. “I think I still have your number. Should I call you?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “Give me a call tonight, and we’ll make plans.”
It takes me until he gets a few steps down the hallway before I wonder how he knows that I’m writing a book. I’m about to call out to him, despite the evil looks coming from Lisa, who perhaps is harboring a secret crush on Rob Zuckerman, when he turns around and says, “Hey, did you see my comment this morning? I finally figured out how to add my name. I think I’m something like number four-hundred. Your blog sure is popular.”
I smile because if I don’t, I’m going to start crying. And I’d at least like to get to the elevator bay before that occurs.
