After I Do

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  Rachel hugs him, too, and then he takes off, up the escalator and back home to Chicago, where people have seasons and cold air. I’ve never understood it. People come from all over the country to experience our sunny winters and mild summers. Charlie got out as soon as he could, looking for snow and rain.

  As Rachel and I are walking back to the car, we get lost and end up on the floor below at Arrivals. It occurs to me that Arrivals is a much nicer place to be than Departures. Departures is good-bye. Arrivals is hello.

  I happen to look toward the revolving doors. I see dads coming home to their families. I see men and women in business suits finding their drivers. I see a young woman, probably a college student, run toward the young man waiting for her. I see her wrap her arms around him. I see him kiss her on the lips. I see, on their faces, that feeling I once knew so well. I see relief. I see joy. I see that look people get when the thing they have been dreaming of is finally in front of them, able to be touched with the tips of their fingers and the length of their arms. I think I stare for a second too long, because she turns to look at me. I smile shyly and look away. I think of when it was me, when I was the one waiting at Arrivals for that one person I ached for. Now I’m the lady looking.

  For a moment, I think that if I saw him right now, if Ryan were here, I’d have the same look on my face as this couple has. I want him in my arms that badly. But how long would it last? How long before he said something that pissed me off?

  When Rachel and I finally get headed in the right direction, we walk out onto the street level and wade our way through people hailing cabs and hopping into their friends’ cars. We are standing at the crosswalk, waiting to cross the street, when I see two people waiting for a shuttle. As quickly as I would recognize my own face in the mirror, I know what I am looking at. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I am looking at the back of Ryan’s head.

  It doesn’t even register as weird at first; my brain simply processes it as a normal, everyday occurrence. Oh, here is that person who’s always around. Here he is. Except this time, he is holding the hand of a slim, tall brunette. And now he’s bending down to kiss her.

  My heart drops. My jaw drops. Rachel starts crossing the street, but I just stand there, frozen. Rachel turns around to see me there, and her eyes catch mine. She follows my gaze, and she sees it, too. Ryan. Ryan at Arrivals. Ryan. At Arrivals. Kissing a woman. My heart starts beating so fast that I almost feel I can hear it. Is it possible to hear blood pulsing through you? Does it sound like a quiet, violent gong?

  Rachel grabs my hand and doesn’t say anything. She is determined to get me out of this situation. She wants me to cross the street. She wants me to get into the car. But we have missed the walk signal, and we can’t just run through this steady stream of cars, as much as, right now, that feels like the only thing to do.

  It’s good that she’s holding me. I fear that I lack the self-control not to go over there and knock him down. I want to pummel him to the ground and ask him why he would do this. Ask him how he looks at himself in the mirror. I swear to God, it’s as if I can physically feel the pain. It’s a physical pain. And it’s searing through me. And then the light turns, and the white walk sign is on, and I put one foot in front of the other, and I move forward, and I think of nothing but how much this hurts and which foot goes where. When we get to the other side of the street, when the walk sign turns into a red hand, I turn around and look at him. We are now separated by a sea of speeding cars.

  When my eyes find him again, when they fixate on the front of his face, I can plainly see that I was wrong. It’s not him. It’s not Ryan.

  I can spot Ryan in a crowd. I can recognize his scent from another room. Just a few months ago, we were separated at the grocery store, and I found him by recognizing his sneeze from a few aisles away. But at this airport, this time, I got it wrong. It’s not Ryan. All of that fear and jealousy and hurt and pain so sharp I thought it could cut me—it wasn’t real. It was entirely imaginary. It’s stunning, really, what I can do to myself with only a misunderstanding.

  “It wasn’t him,” I say to Rachel.

  She slows down and looks. “Wait, are you serious?” she says, squinting. “Oh, my God, you’re right.”

  “It wasn’t him,” I say, stunned. My pulse slows, my heart relaxes. And yet I am still overstimulated and jumpy. I slow down my breathing.

  Rachel puts her hand on her chest. “Oh, thank God,” she says. “I did not want to have to talk you down from that.”

  We get into the car. I put on my seat belt. I roll down the window. It’s OK, I tell myself. It didn’t happen.

  But it will someday.

  He’s going to kiss someone else, if he hasn’t already. He’s going to touch her. He’s going to want her in a way that he no longer wants me. He’s going to tell her things he never told me. He’s going to lie there next to her, feeling satisfied and happy. She’s going to remind him of how good it can feel to be with a woman. And while all of this is happening, he’s not going to be thinking about me at all. And there’s not a thing I can do to stop it.

  Over the course of the next few days, it is all I can think about. I am seething with jealously over something that I have no evidence of. It consumes me to the point where I can’t sleep night after night. By Friday, I can’t keep all this angst to myself. I ask Mila’s advice.

  “Do you think he’s already slept with someone?” I ask her when we’re getting tea from the office kitchen.

  “How should I know?”

  “I just mean, do you think that he has?”

  “Why don’t we talk about this at lunch?” Mila says, looking around the kitchen in the hopes that no one is listening.

  “Yeah, OK,” I say.

  Mila and I go out for Chinese food, and she brings it up. It takes her about four minutes. Which is four minutes longer than I wanted to wait, but I didn’t want to seem like a crazy person.

  “Do you want the truth?” she says.

  I’m not clear on how to answer, because it’s entirely possible that I want to be lied to.

  “Yes,” she says. “I think he probably has.”

  It’s a knife in my chest. I’ve never been the jealous type with Ryan. It was always so clear that he wanted no one but me. For so much of our relationship, it was obvious that he loved me and desired me. I never felt threatened by any woman. He was mine. And now I’ve set him free.

  “Why?” I say. “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, first of all, he’s a man. That’s the biggest piece of evidence. Second of all, you said yourself you two were not having all that much sex. So it’s probably been pent up inside of him. He probably slept with the first woman who looked at him the right way.”

  I take a long sip of my soda. It becomes a gulp and then sort of a chug. I put my cup down. “Do you think it’s with someone prettier than me?”

  “How on earth would I know that?” Mila says. “You have to stop torturing yourself. Accept that it has probably happened. The stress of questioning whether it has or has not happened is too much. You have to just assume that it has happened and start to deal with it. He slept with someone else. What are you going to do?”

  “Die, mostly,” I say. Why does this feel so awful? Why does it feel so much more awful than when he left? Deciding to separate was hard. Actually separating was hard. But this? This is something entirely different. This is devastating. This is . . . I don’t know. It feels as if I will never feel better in my entire life.

  Mila grabs my hand. “You’re not going to die. You are going to live! That is the point here. C’mon! You were not happy with him. Let’s not sugarcoat the past. You were deeply unhappy. You said yourself that you didn’t love him. You two are going your separate ways. If anything, this should just show you that it’s time for you to find your own way.”

  “What does that mean, though?” I say. Is
n’t that what I’ve been doing?

  Mila puts down her fork and clasps her hands, getting down to business. “What are you doing this weekend?” she asks me pointedly. “Do you have plans for tonight?”

  “Well, I got a new book from the library,” I say. Mila makes a face but doesn’t interrupt me. “And then I heard LACMA is free tomorrow, so I thought maybe I’d check that out. Haven’t been in a while.” I made that last part up. I have absolutely no plans to go to LACMA. I haven’t gone to an art museum since college. Probably not going to start now. I just didn’t want to admit that I have no plans at all.

  “Uh-huh.” Mila is not impressed.

  “What?” I say.

  “That sounds pretty close to what I’m going to do, except instead of LACMA, I’m going to take Brendan and Jackson to get their hair cut.”

  “OK . . . ?” I say.

  “I’m in a committed relationship with twins, and you’re single.”

  Single? No. I am not single. “I am not single,” I say. “I’m . . . married but . . .”

  “Estranged?”

  “Oh, that’s an awful word.” I don’t know why it’s such an awful word. There’s just something about how all the vowels and consonants come together that I don’t care for.

  “You’re single, Lauren. You live alone. You have no one who expects you to be anywhere at any given time.”

  “Well, Rachel sometimes . . .” I don’t even finish the sentence. “Fine, I’m single,” I say. “What is the point?”

  “Get out of the house! Go get drunk and screw someone you don’t know.”

  “Oh, my God!” I don’t know why I find it so shocking. I guess it’s that she’s talking about me. Me! I mean, I know that is what people do. They go out to bars, and they meet strangers, and they have casual sex with them after a few dates or no dates or however many dates they feel they need to justify what they want to do. I get that. But I have never done that. I never really had the opportunity. And now, I guess, I do have the opportunity, but it feels as if I’ve missed the starting line for that sort of thing; that race took off without me. I gather myself and look at Mila, but her face doesn’t change.

  “I’m serious,” she says. “You need to get out there. You need a love affair or something. You need to get laid. By someone who isn’t Ryan. You need to see what it’s like with someone else. Have you even ever slept with someone besides Ryan?”

  “Yeah,” I say, somewhat defensively. “I had a boyfriend in high school.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes!” I say, now definitely defensive. “What is the big deal?”

  “It just isn’t enough people.”

  “It is!” I say.

  Mila shakes her head and puts down her fork. She tries another approach. “Do you remember what it was like the first time you kissed Ryan?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and within a second, I feel as if I’m back there. I’m leaning across the table, over my burger and fries. I’m kissing him. And then I remember how it felt when he kissed me back. When he kissed me on the way home. When he kissed me good-bye. Even after kissing became a thing we did like breathing, without thinking, without care, I held on to those first kisses. I relished the way my heart stopped for a second whenever our lips met.

  “Remember how good it felt to be kissed for the first time? How it felt electric? Like you could power a whole house off your fingertips?”

  “You’ve really thought about this.”

  “I just love the beginnings of relationships,” Mila says wistfully. “The first time Christina kissed me . . . nothing compares to that. Now I kiss her, and it’s like, ‘Hey, how are you? What smells? Is it the trash?’”

  We both start laughing.

  “Anyway, I can’t help but be excited for you, knowing that you have the chance to have that feeling again. You can meet someone and feel those butterflies again, if you want to.”

  “No, I can’t,” I say. “I have a husband to go back to.”

  “Yeah, in ten and a half months. Some marriages don’t even last ten and a half months. You can have a love affair, Lauren. One that makes you feel like you did when you were nineteen. If it were me, that’s what I would be doing.”

  I let this settle for a minute as I think about it. It does sound nice, in a lot of ways, and it also sounds terrifying and messy. How can I have a love affair when I’m married? How can I juggle those two huge relationships? An active romance and an inactive marriage?

  “Do you think Ryan is having a love affair?” I ask Mila.

  Mila loses her patience. “That’s what you’re taking from this?”

  “No,” I say. “I get your point. I do. I’m just . . . if he was . . . what would that mean?”

  “It would mean absolutely nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. Did you love your high school boyfriend?”

  I shrug. “Yeah, I did.”

  “Do you give a shit about him now?”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Well, that’s a love affair for you.”

  • • •

  Despite Mila’s advice, I continue to obsess. I think about it on the drive home. I think about it as I’m feeding Thumper. I think about it while I’m watching TV, while I’m reading a book, while I’m brushing my teeth. It drives me mad. My brain replays the same imagined images over and over. It falls down a rabbit hole of what ifs. I just want to know what is going on in his life. I just want to hear his voice. I just want to know that he’s OK and he’s still mine. I can’t have lost him yet. He can’t be someone else’s yet. I can’t do this. I can’t live like this. I can’t live without him. I can’t. I have to know what he’s thinking. I have to know how he is.

  I want to call him. I have to call him. I have to. I pick up the phone. I push the icon next to his name, and then I immediately hang up. It didn’t even get a chance to ring. I can’t call him. He doesn’t want me to call him. He said not to call him. I can’t call him.

  My laptop is right in front of me. It’s easy to grab. When I open it up, I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I’m not sure what I’m doing. And then, opening the browser, I know exactly what I’m doing. I know exactly what I’m looking for. I don’t bother trying to hide it from myself. I have gone into the deep end. I have lost control.

  I sign into Ryan’s e-mail.

  His in-box loads, and it’s empty. I stop myself. This is wrong. It’s incredibly, very, super, really, totally, completely, and absolutely wrong. I move my cursor to the menu, and I hover over where it says “Sign out.” This is where I should click. This is what I should do. I can turn around. I can pretend I never did this. I don’t have to be this person. For a second, it feels so easy. It seems so clear. Just log out, Lauren. Just log out.

  But before I click it occurs to me that he never changed his password. He could have, right? It would make sense if he had. But he hasn’t. Does that mean something?

  I notice the number seven by his drafts folder. He has seven unsent e-mails. I don’t even think, really, it’s just an impulse. I drag the cursor down and click the folder open. There I see seven e-mail drafts, all addressed to me. All with the subject “Dear Lauren.”

  They are addressed to me. They are for me. I can click on these. Right?

  • • •

  August 31

  Dear Lauren,

  Leaving the house today sucked. I don’t know why we did this. When I wrote you that letter, it took everything I had not to rip it up and sit down and just stay there until you came home and we could sort this all out.

  But then I thought about the last time you were happy to see me when I got home, and I couldn’t remember when that was. And thinking about that made me so mad that I picked up the last of my things and I walked out the door.

  I didn’t say good-bye
to Thumper. I couldn’t do it. It makes me sick to think about sleeping in this stupid apartment tonight. I don’t have a bed yet. I don’t have much of anything yet except our TV. My friends have helped me put everything where it sort of belongs, and they left about an hour ago.

  I’m miserable. I’m fucking miserable about this. I was glad when my friends left, because I didn’t have it in me to pretend to be OK anymore. I’m not OK. I feel sick. I’ve lost my wife and my dog. I’ve lost my home.

  I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t even know if I’m going to send it. Part of me thinks that you and I have been so dishonest with each other lately that a little honesty, a little discourse, might improve things. I have spent so long saying, “Sure, I’ll go to the mall with you to pick out new lipstick,” when I didn’t want to. Saying, “Yeah, Greek food sounds great,” when it doesn’t, that I hate you for it now. I hate Greek food, OK? I hate it. I hate how we can never just get a hamburger anymore. Why does every dinner have to be a tour of the world? And if so, why can’t we just stick with normal shit like Italian and Chinese? Why Persian food? Why Ethiopian food? I hate it. And I hate that you love it. It’s so pretentious, Lauren. Just eat normal food.

  Ah. See? This is why I know that it’s good that I left. I hate you for liking falafel. I don’t think that’s healthy.

  But also, I don’t know that it’s so unhealthy that it means I have to sleep alone tonight on this shitty carpet.

  But then I think about going home. I think about walking through the door and you not even getting up off the couch. I think about how you’ll just look at me and say, “Pho for dinner?” and I want to punch the wall.

  So, fine. I’m here. I’m alone. I’m miserable. And I know it makes me a terrible person, but I really hope you’re miserable, too. That’s the truth. That’s how I feel right now. I really, really hope that you’re miserable, too.