by Melissa Ford
“You bought me combs, but I sold my hair,” I tell Adam.
Maybe because I have spoken to him in his language, using words from a short story, his body visibly relaxes, and he starts laughing. So do I. We’re both laughing without taking a step back to look at the fact that we’re cracking up over the demise of our marriage. It just feels good to laugh after so much tension. His hand slaps the table a few time, and I watch his fingers come down against the edge. The ringless third finger on his left hand.
And that is what pushes me over the edge, that image of his hand without the reminder of me around his ring finger. My laughing crosses over to real tears, and I am crying as I did in the apartment, except this time with an audience staring at me inquisitively. It is almost as if he is seeing me cry for the first time, a train wreck that he can’t help but gape at from across the table. He doesn’t reach out for my hand or offer me a Kleenex or get me a cup of water. He just watches me cry, as does everyone else in the coffee shop.
“This,” I try catching my breath, “this is the first time you have opened up to me in years. In years.”
“Can we go back to the apartment?” he asks. He glances back at the cat couple. “Are you okay going back there?”
He pays for both of our drinks, grabs his copy of Candide, and helps lead me out of the restaurant. I keep my head down, nose running, as we exit through the frosted glass door. I want to tell him that I still love him, that I want another chance, but since we just shared a laugh about the end of our marriage, it doesn’t seem the appropriate desire to admit. He keeps his hand on the small of my back until we are on the sidewalk, and it feels like an anchor, a small stone keeping me here, keeping me mentally here instead of floating backwards through memories or moving forward to sitting alone in my apartment after this.
His key sticks in the front door lock just as it always did, and he bumps the door with his hip, just as he always did, and I walk past the mailboxes, over the threadbare rug, holding my breath as if I am passing a graveyard. Mailbox gravestones. It has been months since I’ve been back in this building, almost a year.
He opens the door to our old apartment, and I can see that he has changed very little. Everything I left behind is still here. The only thing new is a bookshelf housing an assortment of used books. The shelf where I used to leave my purse is now lined with several pots of cheery, yellow crocus plants. The doors to the bedroom and bathroom are closed. The kitchen still looks unused except for two empty and washed out beer bottles sitting to the left of the sink on the counter. The Picasso poster is still hanging in the living room.
He doesn’t offer me anything to drink, and I choose the sofa to sit on and cry while he grabs the box of Kleenex out of the bathroom. He sits down next to me, waiting for my tears to burn themselves out, but they keep coming and coming again, like Alice in Wonderland.
“Rach,” he begins softly. He was always good at calming me by speaking softer and softer, until I had to quiet down simply to catch his words. “Why did you come here today?”
I know he is asking me why I acted on whatever impulse flitted through my mind, but without being able to put that into words, I tell him the story of Rob Zuckerman and the case of the wrongly accused cyberstalker. I take a deep breath and set my heart down on the table. “I wanted the reader to be you. I wanted it to be you missing me as much as I have missed you.”
Then he takes my heart and squeezes it through his fingers until it is just a mess of pulp and gore. “I’m dating someone, Rach.” I stop breathing for a moment; I am literally holding my breath, but I only notice this when I gasp out all of the air I’ve trapped in my lungs. It doesn’t matter that I already knew that he was with Laura. It still hurts to hear him say it aloud; to know that perhaps things are actually quite good with her. “And so are you,” he adds.
“I’m not,” I tell him. “I’m not anymore.”
“So is that what this is? You’ve broken up with someone and you don’t want to be alone?”
His voice isn’t accusatory; it’s simply inquisitive. Questioning. I shake my head, looking around the room for signs of Laura. A picture of her cats, an object they’ve purchased together. But the room reveals nothing. I realize how little I actually know about her beyond her stories about panties and incredible alcohol consumption. Maybe she’s really someone Adam can discuss Voltaire with over manicotti at the Italian restaurant on the corner.
I want to form an argument for myself, ask him to choose me over her. But without knowing anything more about her beyond her design work and cats, it’s hard to form an argument. How can I point out myself to be the better woman when I have no idea whether or not I am actually the better woman?
I’m well aware of how hypocritical I’m being after carrying on a relationship with Gael, but while the image of myself in bed with Gael has been put to rest, I am immediately haunted by the new image of Adam rolling around with Laura, bringing her to orgasm (because, in my imagination, she’s the type of woman who orgasms every single time—from sex, from backrubs, from him looking at her from across the room. She puts Arianna to shame.) In my old bed. In our old bed.
He continues to watch me, his hand tucked behind his ear, his elbow resting on the back of the sofa. It is the way he used to read books, the pages held in front of his face. I imagine all the times we’ve sat on this very couch, reading books together. And now he reads books with Laura.
“I wanted to see you because I thought I finally understood something,” I hear myself say. What the hell am I doing, giving him more ammunition for my ultimate embarrassment? “How you could love work so much that it becomes your whole life. I thought you weren’t coming home from the office because you had these expectations of wifely duties that I wasn’t fulfilling. That you wanted me to take care of you. To support you. Well, now I know how to take care of someone; to make chicken soup when they’re sick and make pancakes for breakfast. And the only person I want to take care of is you.”
I stumble onward, unable to stop talking. “I used to sit in this room alone. Every night. I used to watch the clock and yell at you when you walked in the door. I thought that if I pointed out the time to you enough times, loudly enough, you would come home earlier. I didn’t want to just ask you to come home early; I thought it meant more if you thought of it yourself. That’s all I wanted, Adam, just your time. You gave me more of your time when you were in law school, even when you were studying for the bar and you had no time. You always found some and gave it to me. I knew how precious your time was, and the fact that you would give it to me spoke volumes.”
I start crying again, and Adam proactively hands me a Kleenex. “But now I know my nagging was just one more thing you thought I was asking for—you thought I wanted your time and your money and something had to give. It’s too late, but what I should have done is make you want to be here. By taking care of you, too. And I should have asked for what I wanted rather than waiting for it to occur to you.”
“Where did you get this idea about wifely duties?” Adam asks, genuinely confused.
“You said it! You said I never was supportive.”
“Of me wanting to be a teacher! I didn’t care if you cooked or didn’t cook. If you did the laundry or if we sent it out to a service. Rach, I was talking about the fact that you knew I wanted to be a teacher, knew I loved the world of literature, but you never told me that it was okay to go that route. I thought if I didn’t work as a lawyer, give you the life you wanted, that you’d be disappointed in me.”
“I didn’t know how much you wanted to be a teacher. I’m sorry that I overlooked that; that I missed that. It never mattered to me what job you held. I thought you loved being a lawyer so much that you wanted to be a lawyer more than you wanted to be with me.”
Adam is silent for a long time.
And finally, he says, “I’m sorry.”
It’s not enough. It’s not nothing, but it’s not enough. The fact that he’s dating Laura, coupled with those s
ole words, sort of shuts the door on more conversation. There is nothing left to say or do; even his eyes flicker towards the door as if he’s subconsciously telling me to go. I scoop my heart off the table and place its mangled remains back in my chest. I gather my purse and say vague supportive comments about having a good future and thanking him for allowing me to get these thoughts off my chest.
He watches me collect my things, not stopping me, which shreds my heart a little more. But that’s sort of the thing about time—once it passes, you can’t move backwards. And while it is nice that I realized all these things about our relationship, it is now too late. The time to have done this hard thinking was years ago, and I can only move on from here, keeping in mind all that I learned.
Except that I’ll be alone forever, I think dramatically, while he’ll have Laura and their cat babies.
I say goodbye, and Adam tells me feebly to wait, but I know it’s just a pity “Wait,” one of those “Waits” you say when you can’t think of any other word to say and you know one is expected of you. I don’t wait. I just give a really cringy smile and dump my Kleenex in the garbage can that I purchased at the Duane Reade. I twist the knob on the door that I painted a few years back and step into my old hallway. This is the last time I will ever be here, I think.
I go back downstairs, sniffling the whole time. This is the worst part about gaining knowledge—what’s the point in doing all this mental work and coming out with these answers when it’s too late to use the information?
Now it just feels like torture to finally know the right response but also know that there is no chance to use it. I push my way back out onto the street. During the time that we’ve been inside, it has gotten dark and cold. I pull my jacket tightly around my chest and begin walking back towards the subway.
I start composing blog posts in my mind. Adam has moved on without me. He and Laura are probably talking about me as I write, drinking their wine out of the glasses that my Aunt Leah gave us for our wedding.
“Rachel!” I hear Adam call from behind.
I turn around, and Adam is jogging towards me, just like in a movie. He is slightly out of breath, as if he has leapt down the stairs two at a time, and he leans on the railing by the subway stairs to catch his breath. A man playing saxophone nearby starts wailing louder on his sax, nodding at us and half-smiling at the same time. I toss some change from my coat pocket into his case and wait for Adam to speak.
“There is no one,” he tells me.
“What about Laura?”
“I’m not dating Laura anymore. It was a brief thing.”
“You just said in the apartment that you’re still dating her.”
“Laura is dating some teacher at work now. Her brother set them up after I broke up with her. Rach, I’m not dating Laura.”
“You broke up with her? When?”
He bit his lower lip. “Right before I saw you at her party. When I found out you two knew each other. She was dating the teacher by the time we saw each other at her apartment. ”
“Why did you say . . .”
“I thought you were still dating that Spanish guy you brought to the party.”
“Gael? I broke up with him. But . . . at the party . . . I heard you tell someone that you were relieved to be divorced.”
“I never said that,” Adam insists. “I’m relieved to be out of the law firm. I was never relieved to be out of our marriage.”
Adam squints at me, somewhat distracted by the saxophone and the people pushing past out of the subway. We both stand there awkwardly, as if we’ve run out of shocking truths.
“I thought about you a few weeks ago,” he admits. “Before I saw you at the party. I was teaching a poetry unit to the kids, and the anthology we were using had that Longfellow poem in it. Remember that ring I got you from London with the inscription in it?”
“Bizarro wedding band,” I say.
“Right. I decided to read it with the kids. And one of the kids asked the etymology of the word ‘strange.’ So we looked it up online. I don’t remember the whole thing—maybe it’s from Old French—but part of the definition of strange is ‘Someone who has stopped visiting.’ And I thought, That’s what I became to Rachel.”
My husband the stranger, I once called him when he walked in the apartment. Isn’t this the way it always works—that the answers are with you the entire time, sometimes even entwined around your finger, and you just don’t see them until it’s too late.
“I never told you what I was thinking because, as I said, I never felt you wanted me to be a teacher. I always wondered if you married me for the money—my family’s money or the salary I could pull in as a lawyer,” he continues. “I would have shared all of that before this point if I had thought that you would hear it and . . .do something with it.”
He waits again. I’m not sure if I like his new habit of circumspection, pausing after every two sentences. But we can work on that now that Laura has fizzled out like static on a television.
Adam says, “I want a chance to talk again. With no promises, Rach. Just a chance to think all of this out.”
“We may still reach the same conclusions,” I warn tearfully, but smiling.
“We just need to have the conversation that we never had last year, and see where it takes us.”
It will really suck, I want to joke, if we discover that we could have worked through all the misunderstandings without needing to divide all of our property and pay two divorce attorneys. But perhaps we could have never ended up here, leaning close to each other on the railing of the subway stairs, if we hadn’t gone through the divorce and rebirth. He wouldn’t have shown me who he really wants to be. I certainly would have never found my passion for cooking, or my confidence in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have found my voice as a writer or connected with an audience through the blog. I don’t think we could have ever moved forward until I found something for myself, a small passion. Like the filling inside a pie. Without the apple slices and cinnamon, a pie is only an empty shell.
And that’s what I was when I used to sit home by myself, thinking that he didn’t care.
“Can I take you out for dinner tomorrow night?” he asks.
“No,” I say firmly. Then, quickly, to dispel the disappointment flickering in his eyes, I explain, “Let me make you dinner.”
He smiles. “At your apartment? Tomorrow night?”
I write the address on a small slip of paper from my purse. We stare at each other for a long time, not saying anything, and then he gives me a small kiss on the cheek.
I hear him whisper another apology under the wail of the saxophone.
I whisper one back.
My mother has agreed to let me cook the Passover seder meal this year. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but since she has protested this the last few times I raised the idea, it feels like a small victory. She still tells me that she doesn’t see the point in me cooking when the caterer can produce a perfectly lovely meal. But it means something to me.
I can finally call myself a cook. A home chef. I’ve graduated from the basic cooking books and borrowed a new slew of ethnic cookbooks from the library. And before you twist your underpants in a tizzy, it doesn't mean it’s the end of the blog. Oh no, dear readers, you're stuck with me. I will always find new recipes to write about, new lessons to learn, new neuroses to unload. My hope is that I can keep this level of honesty in everything I'm touching—
this blog, my food.
I declare this the start of my Honest Food Movement.
Honesty + food = if not something good, then at least something without regrets.
In honor of landing the Passover meal, tonight I’m making a meal combining everything I learned this year—from roasting to basting to baking (gasp!) to sauces. I have tried to incorporate every type of knife cut and ingredients from all four food groups. It wasn't difficult. The choices were clear. Second-nature. I only hope it tastes as good as it looks.
But in the trad
ition of the great cliffhanger, a critique of the meal will need to wait until the next post, because I just heard the buzzer I've been waiting for from the building’s front door.
Chapter Thirteen
Pinching the Salt
Unlike the first time I cooked for Gael, I am not nervous when I hear the buzzer announcing Adam’s arrival. I feel shy; I feel anxious to hear his thoughts on the meal; I feel a fluttering sensation at the base of my throat, somewhere close to where it meets my stomach. I am anything but hungry. But I’m also at peace. Having the strength to pull myself off of our sofa and walk out of our apartment without the promise of a next meeting has filled me with confidence. I will get through the next phase, this night, whatever “this” happens to be.
While I was cooking, I checked Sitestalker for old time’s sake. And there, most likely for the first time, was Gael Paez. He stayed on only for a few minutes, and I have no deep feelings about his visit. It was like Alice catching a glimpse of the Mad Hatter while she does her toiletry shopping at Target. She has moved on from Wonderland; her experience there helped her find a new way to be happy in the real world. It’s nice to see the Hatter over there by electronics, but she doesn’t need to follow him through the store, understand why he’s there, or search for greater meaning.
Goodbye Mad Hatter. Goodbye March Hare, and Red Queen.
Before Adam arrives, Arianna and my brother call from her apartment. Ethan promises me that Adam has always been his favorite brother-in-law, despite all the times he cursed him this year. Even though they are an odd couple, I can already tell there is something about Arianna and Ethan that works, a comfortable give-and-take where they finish each other’s sentences and move with a fluidity that cannot be learned or faked. He ducks off the phone call to take care of Beckett, and Arianna whispers a final “Good luck,” and tells me to call her the second Adam leaves.
