Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “Hi, Elsie,” she says to me as she finally turns around. She turns her back away from her friends, and her torso now faces mine. “How are you?” she asks me.

  “I was just about to ask you that,” I say.

  She nods. “This is the most fucked-up day of my life,” she says. The minute the word fuck comes out of her mouth, she becomes a real person to me, with cracks and holes, huge vulnerable spots and flaws. I see Ben in her, and I start to cry. I hold back the tears as best I can. Now isn’t the time to lose it. I have to keep it together.

  “Yeah, it’s a hard day,” I say, my voice starting to betray me. “Your speech was . . . ” I begin, and she puts her hand out to stop me.

  “Yours too. Keep your chin up. I know how to get through these things, and it’s by keeping your chin up.”

  This is about all I get from Susan, and I’m not sure if it’s a metaphor or not. She is pulled away by new arrivals that want to prove what good people they are by “being there for her.” I walk back over to Ana, who is now near the kitchen. The waiters are running back and forth with full and empty trays, and as they do, Ana keeps pulling bacon-wrapped dates off the full ones. “I did it,” I say.

  She high-fives me. “When was the last time you ate?” she says, devouring the dates as she asks.

  I think back to the pancake and know that if I tell the truth, she’s going to force-feed me hors d’oeuvres.

  “Oh, pretty recently,” I say.

  “Bullshit,” she says as another waiter comes through with shrimp. She stops him, and I cringe.

  “No,” I say, perhaps too boldly. “No shrimp.”

  “Dates?” she says, handing her napkin over to me. It still has two left. The dates are big, and the bacon looks thick around them. They are gooey from the sugar. I don’t know if I can do it. But then I think about all the seafood here and I know this is my best bet. So I take them and eat them.

  They. Are. Decadent.

  And suddenly my body wants more. More sugar. More salt. More life. And I tell myself, That’s sick, Elsie. Ben’s dead. This is no time for hedonism.

  I excuse myself and head upstairs, away from the food and toward the guest bathroom mirror. I know where I’m going as I walk up the stairs, but I’m not consciously moving there. I feel pulled there. As I get further up the stairs, I can hear a number of voices chattering and people chewing. There are quite a few people hanging out in the guest room. Everyone has come up to see the bathroom mirror. I don’t turn the corner and go into the room. I stand at the top of the stairs, not sure what to do. I want to be alone with the mirror. I can’t bear to see his handwriting with an audience. Do I turn back around? Come back later?

  “That eulogy was convincing,” I hear a man’s voice say.

  “No, I know. I’m not saying it wasn’t convincing,” says another voice, this one higher, womanly, and more committed to the conversation.

  “What are we talking about?” comes a third voice. It’s gossipy, and I can tell just by the tone, the speaker’s got a drink in her hand.

  “Ben’s widow,” says the woman.

  “Ohh, right. Scandal,” the third voice says. “They weren’t even married two weeks, right?”

  “Right,” says the man. “But I think Susan believes her.”

  “No, I know Susan believes her,” the woman says. “I believe her too. I get it. They were married. I’m just saying, you know Ben, you know the way he loved his mom. Don’t you think he would have told her if this was the real deal?”

  I slowly step away, not wanting to be heard and not wanting to hear whatever comes next. As I walk down the steps to find Ana, I catch a glimpse of myself in one of Susan’s mirrors. For the first time, I don’t see myself. I see the woman they all see, the woman Susan sees: the fool who thought she was going to spend her life with Ben Ross.

  FEBRUARY

  It was a Tuesday night and Ben and I were tired. I had had a long day at the library, pulling together a display of artifacts of the Reagan administration. Ben had gotten into an argumentative discussion with his boss over a company logo that Ben was lead on. Neither one of us wanted to cook dinner, neither one of us wanted to do much of anything except eat food and go to bed.

  We went out for dinner at the café on the corner. I ordered spaghetti with pesto. Ben got a chicken sandwich. We sat at one of the wobbly tables out front, with two wobbly chairs, and we ate alfresco, counting the minutes until it was appropriate to go to sleep.

  “My mom called me today,” Ben said, pulling red onions out of his sandwich and placing them on the wax paper underneath.

  “Oh?”

  “I just . . . I think that is part of why I am stressed out. I haven’t told her about you.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it on my account. I haven’t told my parents about you either.”

  “But this is different,” he said. “I am close with my mom. I talk to her all the time, I just, for some reason, I don’t want to tell her about you.”

  I was confident enough by this point that I had Ben’s heart, that the issue here was not me.

  “Well, what do you think is stopping you?” I asked, finishing my pasta. It had been watery and unsatisfying.

  Ben put his sandwich down and wiped the excess flour off his hands. Why on earth do fancy artisan sandwiches have flour on them?

  “I’m not sure. I think part of it is that I know that she will be happy for me but concerned . . . er . . . ”

  “Concerned?” Now I was starting to think maybe I was the issue here.

  “Not concerned. When my dad died, I spent a lot of time with my mom.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “Right, but also, I was worried about her. I wanted to make sure she always had someone around. I didn’t want her to be alone.”

  “Sure.”

  “And then as time went on, I wanted to give her a chance to move on herself. To meet someone else, to find her new life. To really . . . leave the nest, kind of.”

  I chuckled slightly, subtly, to myself. What kind of son wants to help his own mother leave the nest?

  “But she just didn’t.”

  “Right. Well, everyone is different,” I said.

  “I know, but it’s been three years and she’s still in that same house, alone. My mom had the exterior of the house redone after my dad died. I think to keep busy maybe? I don’t know. She got money from the life insurance policy. When that was done, she added an extension. When that was done, she had the front yard redone. It’s like she can’t stop moving or she’ll implode. But she hasn’t changed much about the place inside, really. It’s mostly as my father left it. Pictures of him everywhere. She still wears her wedding ring. She isn’t moving on.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said, listening.

  “I’m worried that my meeting you, meeting this fantastic girl who is perfect for me . . . ” he said, “I’m worried it will be too much. I’m worried she’ll feel left behind. Or . . . that I’m moving on too quickly or something. There’s nothing left in the house to change. And I feel like she’s about to”—he didn’t say it lightly—“crash.”

  “You feel like you need to stagnate because she is stagnating? Or that you need to keep her at bay for now until she settles?”

  “Kind of. For some reason, I just think, when I tell my mom I’m in a really great relationship, some part of her isn’t going to be ready for that.”

  “I guess I don’t understand why it’s so dramatic. I mean, you’ve dated other girls before.”

  “Not girls like you, Elsie. This is . . . you are different.”

  I didn’t say anything back. I just smiled and looked him in the eyes.

  “Anyway.” He went back to his sandwich, finishing it up. “When I tell my mom about you, it’s going to be serious because I’m serious about you and I don’t know . . . I’m worried she’ll take it as a rejection. Like I’m no longer there for her.”

  “So I’m a secret?” I asked, starting to feel bothered and
hoping I was misunderstanding.

  “For now,” he said. “I’m being such a baby, scared of my mom. But if you don’t have a problem with it, I just want to be delicate with her.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, but then felt myself speaking up. “But not forever, right? I mean, you’ll tell her eventually.” I didn’t say the last part as a question and yet, that’s exactly what it was.

  Ben nodded as he finished chewing. “Absolutely!” he said. “When the time is right, I know she’ll be thrilled.” He rolled up the wax paper from his sandwich. He pitched it toward the trash can and missed. He laughed at himself, walked over, picked up the ball of paper, and put it in the trash can. By the time he grabbed my hand and started to lead us back to my place, I had come around to his way of seeing it.

  “Thank you, Elsie. For understanding and not thinking I am a gigantic douchey mama’s boy.”

  “You’re not scared your mom will be mad at you,” I said. “That would make you a gigantic douchey mama’s boy. You’re just scared to hurt her feelings. That makes you sensitive. And it’s one of the reasons I love you.”

  “And the fact that you understand that about me and it’s a reason you love me, makes you the coolest girl in the world,” he said, as he put his arm around me and kissed my temple. We walked awkwardly down the block, too close together to walk gracefully.

  • • •

  When we got to my apartment, we brushed our teeth and I washed my face, both of us using the sink in our own perfectly timed intervals. We took off our jeans. He took off his shirt and handed it to me silently, casually, as if it were now an impulse. I took it and put it on, as he turned on the one bedside lamp and picked up a book with a wizard on the cover. I got in beside him and put my head on his shoulder.

  “You’re going to read?” I asked.

  “Just until my brain stops,” he said, and then he put the book down and looked at me. “Want me to read to you?” he offered.

  “Go for it,” I said, thinking that it sounded like a nice way to fall asleep. My eyes were closed by the time he got to the end of the page, and the next thing I knew it was morning.

  JUNE

  I tell Ana I want to go, and within seconds, we are headed for the door.

  “What’s the matter?” Ana asks.

  “No, nothing. I’m just ready to leave,” I say. Ana’s keys are in her hand, and my hand is on the doorknob.

  “You’re leaving?” Susan asks. I turn to see her a few feet behind me.

  “Oh,” I say. “Yes, we’re going to make the drive back to Los Angeles.” What is she thinking right now? I can’t tell. She’s so stone-faced. Is she happy I’m leaving? Is this all the evidence she needs that I don’t belong in their lives?

  “Okay,” she says. “Well.” She grabs my hand and squeezes it. “I wish you the best of luck, Elsie.”

  “You too, Susan,” I say. I turn around and catch Ana’s eye, and we walk out the door. It isn’t until my feet have hit the cement in her driveway that I realize why I am so bothered by what she just said, aside from how disingenuous it was.

  She thinks she’ll never see me again. It’s not like I live in Michigan. She could easily see me if she wanted to. She just doesn’t want to.

  When we get home, I run to the bathroom and shut the door. I stand against it, holding the knob still in my hand. It’s over. Ben is over. This is done. Tomorrow people will expect me to start moving on. There is no more Ben left in my life. I left him in Orange County.

  I lock the door behind me, calmly walk over to the toilet, and puke bacon-wrapped dates. I wish I had eaten more in the past few days so I’d have something to give. I want to expel everything from my body, purge all of this pain that fills me into the toilet and flush it down.

  I open the bathroom door and walk out. Ana is standing there, waiting.

  “What do you want to do?” she asks.

  “I think, really, I’m just going to go to sleep. Is that okay? Do you think that’s bad? To go to sleep at”—I look at the clock on my cell phone; it is even earlier than I thought—“to go to bed at seven oh three p.m.?”

  “I think you have had a very hard day and if you need to go to sleep, that’s okay. I’m going to go home and let my dog out and I’ll be back,” she says.

  “No.” I shake my head. “You don’t need to, you can sleep in your own bed.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want you to be alone if you—”

  “No, I’m sure.” I don’t know how she’s been sleeping here for all of these days, living out of a backpack, going back and forth.

  “Okay.” She kisses me on the cheek. “I’ll come by in the morning,” she adds. She grabs her things and heads out the door, and when it closes, the apartment becomes dead and silent.

  This is it. This is my new life. Alone. Quiet. Still. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Ben and I had mapped out our lives together. We had a plan. This wasn’t the plan. I’ve got no plan.

  FEBRUARY

  Ben called me from the car to tell me he would be late. Traffic was backed up.

  “I’m stuck on the 405. Nobody’s moving and I’m bored,” he said to me. I had been at lunch with Ana and had just left and made my way home.

  “Oh no!” I said, opening up my front door and placing my things on the front table. “How far away are you?”

  “With this traffic I can’t even tell, which sucks because I want to see you,” he said.

  I sat down on the couch and kicked my shoes off. “I want to see you too! I missed you all morning.” Ben had spent the night with me and left early to make the visit down to Orange County. He had planned on telling his mother about us and wanted to do it in person.

  “Well, how did it go?” I asked.

  “We went out to breakfast. She asked a lot about me. I kept asking about her, but she kept turning the conversation back to me and there just . . . there wasn’t an opening to say it. To tell her. I didn’t tell her.”

  He didn’t say the phrase “I’m sorry,” but I could hear it in his voice. I was disappointed in him for the first time, and I wondered if he could hear it in mine.

  “Okay, well . . . you know . . . it is what it is,” I said. “Is traffic moving? When do you think you’ll be home? Er . . . here. When do you think you’ll be here?” I had started to make this mistake more and more often, calling my home his home. He spent so much time here, you’d think he lived here. But paying rent in one place and spending your time in another was just the way things were done when you were twenty-six and in love. Living together was something entirely different, and I was showing my hand early by continuing to make that mistake.

  “You keep doing that!” he teased me.

  “Okay, okay, it was a mistake. Let’s move on.”

  “The freeway is clearing up so I should be there in about a half hour, I think. Then I think I’ll move in, in about four months. We will get engaged a year after that and married within a year after that. I think we should have time alone together before we have kids, don’t you? So maybe first kid at thirty. Second at thirty-three or thirty-four. I’m fine to have three if we have the money to do it comfortably. So, with your biological clock, let’s try for the third before thirty-eight or so. Kids will be out of the house and in college around fifty-five. We can be empty-nested and retired by sixty-five. Travel around the world a few times. I mean, sixty is the new forty, you know? We’ll still be spry and lively. Back from world travel by seventy, which gives us about ten to twenty years to spend time with our grandkids. You can garden, and I’ll start sculpting or something. Dead by ninety. Sound good?”

  I laughed. “You didn’t account for your midlife crisis at forty-five, where you leave me and the kids and start dating a young preschool teacher with big boobs and a small ass.”

  “Nah,” he said. “That won’t happen.”

  “Oh no?” I dared him.

  “Nope. I found the one. Those guys that do that, they didn’t find the one.”

  H
e was cocksure and arrogant, thinking he knew better, thinking he could see the future. But I loved the future he saw and I loved the way he loved me.

  “Come home,” I said. “Er, here. Come here.”

  Ben laughed. “You have to stop doing that. According to the plan, I don’t move in for another four months.”

  JUNE

  I lie in bed all morning until Ana shows up, and she tells me to get dressed because we are going to the bookstore.

  When we walk into the behemoth of a store, I follow Ana along as she picks up books and puts them down. She seems to have a purpose, but I don’t much care what it is. I leave her side and walk toward the Young Adult section. There I find a trio of teenage girls, laughing and teasing each other about boys and hairstyles.

  I run my fingers over the books, looking for titles that I now own on my own bookshelf, their pages torn and softened by Ben’s fingers. I look for names I recognize because I got them from work and brought them home to him. I never guessed correctly, the books he’d want to read. I don’t think I ever got one right. I didn’t have enough time to learn what he liked. I would have learned though. I would have studied it and learned it and figured out who he was as a book reader if I’d just been given enough time.

  Ana finds me eventually. By the time she has, I’m sitting on the floor next to the E-F-G section. I stand up and look at the book in her hand. “What’d ya get?”

  “It’s for you. And I already paid for it,” she says. She hands it to me.

  The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I say, too loudly for a bookstore, even though I realize that’s not the same as a library.

  “No,” she says. She’s taken aback by my reaction. Hell, so am I. “I just thought, you know, it’s a really popular book. There are people out there going through what you are going through.”