CHAPTER 3
I’ve slept with four men,” Abigail said to the bearded guy whose name she still didn’t know. “And one woman. Does that count?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Not a huge number, I know,” she said.
“Probably about average.” He was pulling on a cardigan sweater, and Abigail wished she had her own extra layer. There were still embers in the firepit but any heat it gave off had diminished a while ago. Still, it was too perfect to consider going inside; the sky was a cluster of stars, and the air smelled of the lavender that bordered the patio. “I always heard,” he continued, “that when a man tells you how many women he’s slept with you should halve that number, and when a woman tells you how many men she’s slept with you should double it.”
“So you think I’ve slept with eight men?”
“And two women.”
“Right. And two women.”
“No, I don’t think that. I think you’re telling the truth.”
“I am, actually. I have nothing to lose. I’ll never see you again.”
“That’s probably true. A little sad, though.”
Abigail shifted forward in her cushioned Adirondack chair, to get closer to the ineffective fire.
“You’re cold?” the man said.
“A little bit. Not enough to go inside, though.”
“Want my sweater?”
Abigail found herself saying, “Yes. If you’re honestly offering.”
Before she was done talking, he’d pulled the sweater off and was handing it over to her. She noticed how thin and muscular he was under the tight-fitting flannel shirt. She pulled her arms through the still-warm sweater. One of the smoldering logs in the firepit popped loudly. Her phone buzzed again in her jeans. It was Kyra, checking in. U okay?
She wrote back: Fine. About to go to sleep. CU at breakfast?
There was a hotel right on the vineyard, twelve rooms, and that’s where the members of Abigail’s bachelorette party were staying. She had her own suite; Kyra was staying with Rachel, and Zoe was staying with her sister, Pam, who’d come down from Seattle.
“Why are you here, again?” Abigail asked, realizing as soon as she’d said it that she’d already asked him that question, maybe twice. She ran her tongue along her teeth, always a good test to see just how drunk she was.
“I’m at a ‘still a bachelor’ party for my friend Ron,” he said, making air quotes. “His engagement just broke off, and I’m here celebrating with him. He passed out about five hours ago.”
“Right. You told me that. And you’re from San Francisco and you’re an actor. See, I remember everything.”
“I’m an amateur actor, at a community theater, but I’m really a carpenter. That’s how I make my money.”
“Furniture-making,” Abigail said triumphantly.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Stick with that,” Abigail said. “There’s no future in the theater.” She’d almost said furniture in the theater. She really was drunk.
“Why do you say that?”
“My parents ran a regional theater for twenty years, and it nearly broke them. It did break them, I mean … financially, for sure, and also emotionally. They went out of business two years ago and now they’ll be in debt for the rest of their lives. My father works at an AMC Theatre, and even though they still sort of live together, both of them tell me that they’re separating.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’ll see if it takes,” Abigail said, aware that she sounded flippant, despite the fact she felt anything but. She’d been to her parents’ house recently, and they did seem to be living separate lives, her father having moved out, and her mother putting all her energy toward starting an art gallery with her best friend Patricia.
“But twenty years isn’t nothing. Running a business or being in a marriage. They did something they loved, or that I assume they loved, and they created art. It’s not … all about success or money.”
“No, it was never about money with them, but then it became all about the money, only because they didn’t have any. And maybe I’m just getting cynical, but I think of all those plays they produced each summer, and they’re just gone now, just some photographs and maybe a few hazy memories. It all added up to nothing. It makes me sad.”
“So, what do you do?”
“I’m in publishing, another dying industry.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I work for an independent press that primarily publishes poetry, so, in my case, it’s definitely dying.”
“Probably,” he said. Then added, “Are you a poetry fan?”
Abigail laughed, probably because of the construction of that phrase, as though poetry had fans in the same way that sports teams did, or television series. “I read poetry,” she said. “If that’s what you’re asking. And not just for my job.”
“Who do you read?”
Whom do you read, she said in her head. Out loud, she said, “Lately I’ve been into Jenny Zhang. But Poe is my favorite.”
The man looked upward, as though trying to remember something, then said, “‘For the moon never beams without making me dream of the beautiful Annabel Lee.’”
Abigail laughed. “Oh, look at you, quoting poetry in the firelight.” She didn’t mention that he’d gotten the quote wrong.
“I got lucky. That’s one of the few poems I know.”
“Well, trust me. Any opportunity you get to quote a poem, you’ve got to take it these days. It’s a dying art.”
“Says the person who works at a poetry publisher.”
“I’m hanging on for dear life. It’s a good place to work, actually.”
The man smiled, more of a smirk. He really was handsome, despite the new agey bracelet and the whitened teeth. “When I asked you what you did for a living, I thought you were going to say you were a hedge fund manager or something, the way you talked about your parents.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, only that you seemed cynical about trying to make a living in the arts. I figured you’d have gone into something more stable.”
“No, that’s my fiancé. He’s not a hedge fund manager, but he invests in start-up companies. He can finance my career in the arts, for what it’s worth.”
“Is that why you’re marrying him?”
An ember had floated out from the firepit and landed on Abigail’s sweater. The man’s sweater, actually, Abigail thought. She swatted at it, hoping it wouldn’t leave a mark.
“What did you ask?”
“I asked if you’re marrying your fiancé because he’s wealthy, and now that I’m repeating that, I realize it’s none of my business.”
“No, that’s okay. And also no, that’s not why I’m marrying Bruce, but I do think I’m probably marrying him because of the personality traits that make him rich.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Before I was with Bruce I was with this guy for a long time. He was a writer, a poet. We had a lot in common, I guess, but it was exhausting. He was constantly asking me to read things he’d written or sharing things he’d read. He had this notion of a creative life together, that we’d be broke, and happy, and constantly drunk, and misunderstood. And I got sick of it. Bruce is simple, but in a really good way. All his validation comes from his work, and his work is essentially bankrolling creative people. It’s just so nice to go see a movie with him, and not have him react with rage, or jealousy, or monologue at me about the hidden themes of what we’ve just seen.”
“So you’re saying he’s boring.”
“Who, Bruce? Yes, and it’s awesome.”
“So, the writer guy, what was his name?”
“His name was Ben.”
“So what number was Ben?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was he number two of the men you slept with?”
Ben Perez and Abigail were in the same incoming class at Wesleyan, both English majors, but
they didn’t meet until they shared a class called Waugh, Greene, Spark during the second semester of sophomore year.
After that first class they walked to the dining hall as though they’d done it a hundred times, ate together, and that night went to see Black Narcissus at the Center for Film Studies on campus. They stayed up late in Ben’s single dormitory room, the window cracked, sharing a pack of Camel Blues and a bottle of cheap burgundy, listening to Nino Rota soundtracks. Abigail was instantly infatuated, and that whole first day and night with Ben was filled with the terrifying and thrilling feeling that she’d just met the person who might be the most important person in her life. Her freshman year she’d dated a senior named Mark Copley, who was both Wesleyan’s top tennis player and the editor of its lit magazine. Their relationship was a strictly weekend affair—Friday night parties after which Abigail would spend the night at Mark’s off-campus apartment. Sometimes she’d stay for the weekend, but not always. Abigail, who tended to relate all the occurrences in her life to books or movies, saw her relationship with Mark as two sophisticated partners living lives both separate and together. She thought of Tomas and Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, how the regulated infrequency of their time spent together was what kept it alive. Still, Abigail wound up being hurt when Mark never introduced her to his parents over graduation weekend, and she wasn’t surprised when he told her that now that he was no longer in college, he thought they should stop seeing each other.
“You don’t want to waste your next three years of college with a college graduate. I’ll cramp your style,” he said.
“I think you mean I’ll cramp your style,” Abigail replied.
“That, too,” he said.
So it actually felt good that immediately after meeting Ben, Abigail was plunged into an intense romance, the two of them joined at the hip, living, it seemed, in each other’s mind. They saw the same movies, read the same books. He wanted to write poetry, and Abigail, although she didn’t admit it to anyone but Ben, dreamt of being a novelist. They were together for the next three years of college, and then moved to New York City immediately after graduation, getting an apartment downtown not a whole lot bigger than a one-car garage. Ben changed after college, although it took two years for Abigail to really notice. At school, he’d been content to be a student, to be learning from others, honing his craft, absorbing the world. But once they were settled in New York, Abigail getting a job at Bonespar Press and Ben working at the Strand Book Store, he became obsessed with making it as a poet, befriending a circle of slam and spoken-word poets (even though he claimed to despise those particular genres), and spending more time sending out poems to literary magazines than actually writing them. When he got rejections, he sulked for days, and when he got accepted his mood would improve, but for diminishing lengths of time. He spent hours on the internet getting into fights on comment boards, and he drank constantly. Abigail joined him, but only at night. They would meet friends at Pete’s Tavern, and Ben would argue with anyone about anything, something he’d always done, but it was starting to exhaust Abigail. They brought the arguments home with them from the bar, and sometimes, hungover and exhausted the following morning, Abigail couldn’t even remember what they’d been fighting about. It was always something minor, like the time Abigail told Ben that she loved Shakespeare in Love and he’d been so upset that he disappeared for an entire night.
Three years after college, Abigail was ready to leave Ben, trying to figure out the best way to do it, when, by chance, she spotted him coming out of McSorley’s Tavern, his arm draped around a mutual friend of theirs, Ruth, a jewelry maker living in Brooklyn. Abigail felt a surge of betrayal and anger, like a sudden punch to her stomach, but that feeling lasted for less than an hour. He’d given her a way out and she took it. Still, untangling their relationship, both logistically and emotionally, took nearly a year. It was the same year that the Boxgrove Theatre went out of business, and her parents, who had always represented, at least to Abigail, pillars of competent adulthood, suddenly seemed like a pair of frightened children. Abigail went home every weekend to help them deal with the enormous amount of stuff—the props and costuming—they’d acquired in twenty years, but also to provide emotional support. It wasn’t just that they were crushed by the failure of their business, they were crushed by what they both perceived as the failure of their lives. And they were in debt, mainly because of the loans they’d taken out in order to send Abigail to Wesleyan. All of this—the dissolution of her relationship with Ben, her parents’ failures—made Abigail feel hollowed out, purposeless.
She decided to move home, to help them, emotionally and financially, through their transition into new lives, but they refused.
“Please don’t let us drag you down, Abigail,” her mother said. “Go live your life. We’re totally fine.”
But it was her father she was more worried about. He’d aged about ten years since the collapse of the theater. One night, after her mom had gone to bed, Abigail and her father had stayed up to watch Two for the Road on Turner Classic Movies. He drank steadily through the movie, finishing off the red wine from dinner, and afterward told Abigail that they’d already canceled their premium cable subscription, that it was going away at the end of the month, and he was trying to watch as many old movies on TCM as possible.
Something about that particular detail made Abigail so sad that she had to get up and tell her father she was going to the bathroom, just so he wouldn’t see her cry.
When she came back out, she said to her father, now watching Charade, “I talked to Mom about this, and she wasn’t thrilled by the idea, but I’m thinking of coming home for a while. I know that I could get a job at—”
“No, no, Abby. Your mother and I discussed this. Not a chance. It’s totally enough that you come back on weekends, and you have that great job—”
“It’s not that great a job.”
“It’s in publishing. You’re in the greatest city in the world. Please. We are one hundred percent fine.”
“Okay,” Abigail said. “I hear you both, loud and clear.”
CHAPTER 4
Back in New York, unmoored by her breakup with Ben and feeling powerless to help her parents, Abigail moved into a three-bedroom apartment with two strangers and took an extra job as a nanny for a family on the Upper East Side to just be able to pay her share of the rent. She kept thinking about her father’s words to her, that she had a job in publishing in the greatest city in the world, and somehow those facts, instead of making her happy, made her feel sad and worthless. She was where she’d wanted to be, but she felt like an impostor, a small-town girl playing grown-up in the city.
She started spending time with her college friend Rebecca, who was heavily subsidized by her parents and had her own place near Gramercy Park. Abigail knew that some of Rebecca’s fondness for her was attraction, and out of curiosity, and a requisite amount of attraction herself, Abigail got drunk one night with coworkers, then showed up at Rebecca’s apartment at just past midnight. It was a sexual encounter so awkward that both of them seemed to know, instantly, that they’d killed their friendship. And they kind of had, even though they continued to text and meet for drinks and coffee. But by this point Abigail had decided that, despite her parents’ protests, what she really needed to do was move back to Boxgrove, stay with them, or Zoe, for a while, and get a job waitressing so she could help them with some of their bills. It wasn’t just that she wanted to do it, she was also somehow longing to do it. Moving home would give her purpose.
She was just about to enact this plan when she met Bruce Lamb. She was on her lunch break at a coffee shop, looking at job listings in western Massachusetts, when he sat down at the next table. Abigail glanced at him briefly, just as he was glancing at her, and they smiled at each other, the quick, noncommittal smiles of city people. Abigail remembered thinking that even though the decent-looking thirty-year-old man was wearing faded jeans and a rumpled blazer she could tell that those je
ans and that blazer probably cost more than two months of her rent. She went back to job-hunting.
When the man finished his goat-cheese salad he stood, cleared his dishes, then came over to Abigail’s table. “Excuse me,” he said.
She looked up at him, raising an eyebrow.
“Can I take you to dinner tonight?” he asked.
Abigail laughed, but then she said, “Okay,” surprising herself a little by the swiftness and surety of her answer.
“Do you live around here?”
“Close enough,” Abigail said.
He named a restaurant with a French-sounding name, and they agreed on eight o’clock.
After he left, Abigail thought that at least she’d be getting an expensive dinner in the city bought by a perfect stranger before she left. It could be her New York story.
Dinner was actually nice. She’d thought that, considering the way he’d asked her out, he’d be a player, but he was actually down-to-earth. Almost innocent. He’d just moved to New York from Silicon Valley, where he’d been living (“not really living, just coding”) for the past ten years. He’d started two companies and sold them both, and he was sick of being the idea man and decided to be the moneyman instead, starting up an angel investor business. “I didn’t want to do it in Silicon Valley and I’d always dreamt of living in New York.”
On their third date she told him about her plan to leave the city and move back in with her parents, and she told him about the guilt she felt because of the college loans, and how beaten down her parents were, and how she was sick of the city, anyway. The words came out in a rush, her voice cracking on the word “helpless,” and another voice in her head was imagining that Bruce was right now searching for the EXIT sign.
But after she was finished talking, he said, “I’ll pay your college loans.”
“What?”
Every Vow You Break Page 2
