The Ex Talk

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  I tweet out a shameless request for listeners to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. It gets twenty, thirty, fifty retweets within a few minutes, and it’s hard to ignore the thrill of validation that brings me. I add a form on our section of the PPR website encouraging listeners to submit their dating stories, and I tweet that out, too.

  Then I listen back to our most popular episodes, pull quotes from our guests, turn them into graphics for social media that Ruthie can post on our official Twitter and Instagram accounts this week. No—I’ll do it. I schedule the tweets and posts, spacing them out so we don’t bombard anyone.

  I scroll through my friends lists, looking for people who have a connection to something bigger—former Pacific Public Radio employees who got snapped up by NPR, acquaintances with podcasts of their own. I send about a dozen messages. Hell, I even reach out to producers of some of the biggest dating podcasts, and I go back on social media and promote the shit out of their upcoming episodes.

  It’s not glamorous work, but radio often isn’t. We don’t see the people painstakingly stitching audio clips together, waiting for files to upload, refreshing their subscriber numbers. We see the shows that take off beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, the Serials and the My Favorite Murders and the podcasts hosted by whichever celebrity decided to start their own podcast that week.

  Fortunately, I’m no stranger to the unglamorous, to the behind-the-scenes. I’ve been there for ten years. I’m producer-ing the shit out of this, and if there’s anything I know for certain, it’s that I was a damn good producer.

  * * *

  —

  Slowly but surely, my producing works its magic.

  On Monday, we have a few dozen new Apple Podcasts reviews and dating and breakup stories submitted by listeners.

  On Tuesday, we sign a sponsorship deal with a major mattress company. And both Dominic and I get free mattresses.

  On Wednesday, someone at NPR emails me back, apologizing for the short notice and asking if they can simulcast our grief episode this week.

  That one makes me splash hot coffee all over my keyboard.

  “Shit,” I mutter, racing to the break room for some paper towels.

  “Everything okay over there?” Dominic asks when I return.

  I mop up the spill as best I can. “If by okay you mean, is NPR going to simulcast tomorrow’s episode, then yes.”

  He glances up from his computer. We haven’t exactly been doing sustained eye contact this week, and I’ve been immersing myself in the show as much as possible so I don’t obsess over it. As long as I don’t slow down, I don’t have to think about his hands or his hips or his mouth. His scratchy voice in my ear, asking if I’m almost there.

  Yes, of course this is healthy.

  I tell him about NPR, and then we tell Kent and Ruthie and my mother and Phil, and oh my god. This could be it. This could be the thing that gets us to PodCon, the thing that turns us from cute local podcast to one of those massive success stories.

  All we have to do is nail it.

  * * *

  —

  My mother slips on a pair of headphones like she’s worried they might bite.

  “You’re going to be wonderful,” I tell her from across the table. “You go onstage in front of hundreds of people every night.”

  “Yes, but they don’t have to hear me talk,” she says. “And I’m not being broadcast live on NPR.”

  Ruthie pops her head in. “Need anything, Leanna, Phil? Water, coffee?”

  “Water would be great,” Phil says on my mother’s other side. “Thanks.”

  Dominic is sitting next to me, as usual, and it feels like there’s more space between our chairs than on past Thursdays. Don’t think about the way he smells. Or that he’s wearing your favorite striped shirt. Or that it’s rolled to his forearms.

  I wonder if this is how it would feel if we’d actually dated.

  It’s easier to reassure my mother than it is to reassure myself. When we chatted with the NPR producer, a woman named Kati Sanchez, she told us not to change a thing about the show. She’d write intro copy beamed out to member stations to use if they air our segment later. All we have to do is classic Ex Talk, be ourselves and all of that. With the knowledge that our listenership will be quite possibly multiplied by the thousands.

  Ruthie returns with glasses of water, and Jason counts us down after the top-of-the-hour NPR newsbreak. I pile all my Dominic angst into a box at the back of my mind and nail it shut, determined to leave it there for the next hour.

  When Dominic and I introduce ourselves, our voices aren’t as light as they usually are.

  “We’re doing something a little different today,” Dominic says. “We’re talking about what happens after you lose a spouse or partner, and more specifically, stories about finding love after loss.”

  It feels even worse, lying to my mother on the air when she’s sitting right next to me. But this isn’t about me. Or at least, not entirely.

  I take a deep breath and speak as solidly into the microphone as I can.

  “This show is especially personal to me because I lost my dad when I was eighteen. My senior year of high school.” I wait a beat—an unplanned beat because even though it doesn’t feel, sitting here, like thousands of people are listening, I know they will be. They are right now, live, and they will later. Losing him again and again. “My dad is the person who got me into radio. He had this store where he fixed electronics. Goldstein Gadgets. Maybe some of you out there in Seattle remember it. And okay, you know my voice isn’t the ideal radio voice”—I expect Dominic to maybe laugh at this, but he doesn’t. I clear my throat and go on—“but my dad, he had this perfect radio voice.”

  “So if we’re talking about love after loss, I thought, what better person to have on the show than my mother. She lost him, too—in a different way than I did. Um, Mom . . . thank you for being here. Feel free to introduce yourself.”

  Beneath the table, my mother squeezes my leg. “I’m Leanna Goldstein. I’ve played violin in the Seattle Symphony for about twenty-five years. And I’m a Sagittarius.”

  This earns a few soft laughs from the room.

  “Can you talk about how you met my dad?”

  “Dan Goldstein,” she says, and she knew we’d start this way, but nothing about her feels rehearsed. She’s natural but poised in this wonderful way, like she is onstage but better because this is her voice. “We met as his shop. I had this metronome that had been giving me trouble, and I figured it was a long shot, but I brought it in to see if he could fix it. And much to my surprise, he did. And looked pretty damn adorable doing it.” Her expression morphs into panic. “Shoot, is it okay to say ‘damn’ on here?”

  I assure her that she’s okay—the FCC won’t come after us for that.

  “We’re lucky enough to also have Phil Adeleke in the studio, another Seattle Symphony violinist,” Dominic says.

  “That’s me,” Phil says with his usual cheeriness.

  “And you and Leanna have been sitting next to each other for—”

  “Nearly twenty-five years,” he finishes, and he and my mother laugh.

  “Could you tell us about your wife?”

  That cheeriness doesn’t completely fade, but it does diminish a little. “Joy and I met in college in Boston, in a West African students association. We are both Nigerian, both came to the States for college. She was studying history, and I was studying music, and I proposed on our graduation day.”

  He talks about how it wasn’t a perfect marriage because of course no marriage is. They didn’t always have enough money, and her first bout with cancer a year into their marriage almost destroyed them. But she fought it into remission, and for a long time, they were okay. They moved to Seattle, where she worked in a university library and he in the symphony. Four kids. A mortgage. A cat. Unex
pected kittens.

  And then the cancer came back.

  “I don’t know how you went through all of that,” my mother says to Phil. Like the two of them are having a conversation without either of us here, and this is where radio really becomes great. “For me, it was sudden. One day Dan was here, perfectly healthy, and the next, he was gone. It was unbelievably unfair, I know that. But my heart still breaks for what you went through.”

  “We don’t have to play tragedy Olympics,” Phil says. “What you went through was terrible. What I went through was terrible. Nothing makes any of it any less terrible.”

  Dominic and I sit back, letting them tell their intertwining stories.

  “I truly thought I was done,” my mother says. “I’d been lucky enough to have one great big love, and that was it for me. I didn’t date. I didn’t make any online profiles or go on any apps, like some of my friends wanted me to. Five years passed, and they thought it was time for me to ‘get back out there.’ Seven years, and still nothing.” She shakes her head, and I want to tell her no one can see her doing that. “There was no getting back out there.”

  “We were sitting right next to each other,” Phil says, “and we had no idea the other person was grieving the same way. For so many years.”

  It’s at that moment that my eyes meet Dominic’s for the first time the whole episode. There’s a jolt in my chest that turns into a pang when he looks away first.

  We take a few listener calls through the end. People want to talk to my mother, to Phil. A woman who lost her husband last month tells my mother how great it is to hear her so clearly happy. She says my mother gives her hope, and I wish we had more than an hour to talk about this. To listen to stories.

  When we have a few minutes left on the clock, I gesture to where my mother and Phil’s violins are already set up and mic’d in the corner of the studio.

  “Since we happen to be in the presence of two of Seattle Symphony’s finest,” I say, “we thought you two could play us out.”

  The music is somber but not hopeless. Maybe I’ve never loved it, but my mother does, that’s clear. We’ll never have what I had with my dad, but we have something else.

  Finally, the RECORDING sign blinks off. There’s a burst of applause from the adjoining studio in our headphones. Ruthie’s eyes are wet, and she asks both my mother and Phil for a hug. They’re happy to oblige.

  When it’s over, I hate that the only person I want to celebrate with is Dominic.

  And I hate even more how quickly he leaves the studio.

  Apple Podcasts Reviews

  Iconic duo

  ★★★★★

  I’ve listened to every episode three times, and I can’t stop humming the intro music. My friends are sick of it. My family is sick of it. Do I need professional help? MAYBE! Just give me more Shay + Dom.

  Love love love

  ★★★★★

  I don’t know what I love more: Shay’s cautious optimism or Dominic’s endearing cynicism. Regardless, they’re *chef kiss* perfection together. Five hundred stars.

  Insightful and empowering

  ★★★★

  Fun podcast, surprisingly insightful. Taking off a star because the live calls sometimes drag on too long.

  Garbage

  ★

  I tried so hard to like this, but their discussions are shallow and the hosts aren’t as charming as they think they are. Am I the only one who doesn’t care that they used to date? Why is that interesting? Hard pass.

  otp

  ★★★★★

  if shay and dominic don’t somehow get back together, then i don’t believe in love anymore

  29

  That Friday, we hit the Apple Podcasts Top 100 again at slot number fifty-five, and I’m so relieved, so grateful, so proud that I could cry. I do, a little, in the women’s bathroom at lunch.

  Even better, though, is that PodCon wants us in Austin next month. It’s a last-minute addition to their lineup, but still. We’ll be doing a live show, our very first, and we have a couple more big sponsors interested in coming on board. Dominic went pale when Kent announced it, and I remembered what he said about stage fright way back before our first episode. Well. He’ll just have to deal with it, even if part of me is desperate to reassure him.

  All of it feels unreal, which makes it easier to forget that we built it on a lie. This is what I wanted, wasn’t it? I want to tell Ameena, but we’re still not talking. See? Of course I want this. How can my dad be holding me back if I’m going to PodCon? Maybe if she sees this evidence that proves her wrong, she’ll take back what she said.

  Fortunately, tonight is my friend date with Ruthie. We decided to grab dinner at an Oaxacan restaurant in Ballard, this place with homemade tortillas and seven different kinds of salsa. After working until ten every night this week, I’m utterly exhausted, wrung out, in desperate need of salt.

  “PodCon,” Ruthie says, plunging a chip into pico de gallo. “I can’t believe it. We haven’t even had ten episodes, and we’re going to be at fucking PodCon.”

  “It’s pretty amazing,” I agree. I drag a chip through salsa verde and chew it thoughtfully. Now that the initial excitement has dulled to a buzz, I’m feeling . . . strange. I want Ruthie’s boundless enthusiasm to rub off on me.

  “You look a little off.” Ruthie frowns, as though weighing what she wants to say next. “Can I ask a kind of personal question?”

  “Uh . . . maybe?”

  She laughs. “You can one hundred percent say no. It’s just, I’m around you and Dominic all day, five days a week. And the two of you have been acting especially weird lately.”

  “You’ve noticed that?”

  She nods. “Did you—” She breaks off, shaking her head. “I can’t believe I’m about to ask you this, but . . . has anything happened between the two of you? Since you broke up, I mean?”

  When I’m silent, her jaw drops open.

  “Shay,” she whispers with a shake of her head, but it’s not a judgmental one. “Oh my god. I had a feeling, and not to brag, but I’m never wrong about these things. Never. I swear I won’t say anything to anyone.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I’m still a little mortified over the whole thing?” But that’s not the right word. I’m not mortified when Dominic pushes a hand through his hair, and I’m not mortified when he bends to pick up his work bag and his shoulders flex beneath his shirt. “But I’m not sure we’re anything anymore.” I think about how Dominic was able to be brave with his childhood friend. If he could do that with someone he had so much history with, I should be able to do it here. “It really only happened a few times.”

  “A relapse,” she says. “Maybe it was bound to happen, the two of you working so closely together. It happened after Orcas, didn’t it? Or on Orcas?”

  I’m quiet again, and she lets out a squeal.

  “Part of me wants to say congratulations because, well, he’s gorgeous. The boy does a good lean.”

  “He does indeed,” I agree.

  “But are you okay about it?”

  Ruthie is too good. I don’t deserve her—not when even this bit of truth is tinged with dishonesty.

  “We’re trying to be professional. I . . . sort of ended things last week. Again,” I add quickly.

  “Do you want to be together?”

  “I’m not sure. No.” Why does everyone keep asking me that, as though it matters? “How do you think people would react? If they knew?”

  “I think it would be great fucking radio, first of all. The show bringing you two back together? People would lose their minds.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “But it’s tricky, you’re right.”

  I take a sip of my sangria. “Well, I’m officially sick of talking about myself. Please feel free to talk about you for the rest of dinner.
”

  “It’s funny you think I’m that interesting,” she says. “Well, I think Marco ghosted me, but I’ve been texting with this girl Tatum, and it’s been going well . . .”

  I listen. I really do. Ruthie is great, but I want this to be a salve to my loneliness in a way it can’t possibly be. Not when I’m lying to her.

  And definitely not when I’m lying to myself.

  * * *

  —

  By the middle of next week, Dominic isn’t looking great. I mean, yes, he is still a very attractive human male, but he shows up past nine thirty a couple of days, he’s mostly unshaven, and when he smiles—which is rare—it barely touches his eyes. His Koosh ball is immobile on his desk, lonely and sad.

  Truthfully, I’m not doing great, either. I’m crashing hard, a combination of overworking myself, prepping for PodCon, and checking my phone for nonexistent texts from him and Ameena.

  I’ve gotten back into the habit of staying late at work, not wanting to risk ending up alone in the elevator again. So when he approaches me at my desk at six thirty on Wednesday and grazes my shoulder with his fingertips after I thought everyone else had gone home for the day, I nearly scream.

  “Shit, I thought you’d left,” I say, holding a hand to my heart. “You have some seriously light footsteps.”

  “Sorry.” He leans against his desk. And he really does sound sorry.

  “I know our desks are close,” I say. “But sometimes I like to pretend there’s an invisible line between them, and you just crossed into my bubble. I like my bubble.”

  “I’m sorry again,” he says with a sigh. “Wow, okay, this is not going the way I hoped it would. Look, I just really want to talk to you.”

  “Okay. Talk,” I tell my computer screen.

  “Not here.” The ache in his words wrenches my gaze over to him.

  He looks nothing like the business casual stock photo I used to think of him as. His typically pristine shirt is sporting at least three whole wrinkles. If I look at him too long, then I start replaying what we did on the island, in his bed, in mine, on my couch . . . I only have so much willpower. And when he looks at me like that, I feel my resolve weakening.