Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  The blog post I should write is about how there is nothing lonelier than missing your friend while stressing about your fiancé and his cryptic comments and wondering what to do about your upcoming wedding all at the same time as your career is imploding, during which you’re eating a muffin alone at a table while your tablemate reads a Scandinavian history book and ignores you. But that post would do more damage than good, tablemate’s feelings notwithstanding.

  I startle as I look out the window and see Arianna walking with Noah below, their heads tilted toward one another as if they are trying to speak as softly as possible over the noise of the traffic. This is not her neighborhood, not a place I’d ever expect to run into her, and I wonder if my brain somehow conjured her from the Garment District simply by thinking about her over a blueberry muffin. I grab my groceries, tossing the rest of my pastry into my bag, and hurry down the steps to the street.

  It takes me a few seconds to see her again, and in the interim, I think that I’m going crazy, seeing visions of Arianna because I miss her so much. But then the crowd parts, and I pick her out of the throngs of people, up ahead, still walking with Noah. They’re moving slowly, as if their conversation is weighing them down, becoming a load they’re balancing between them precariously. Arianna turns to throw out a balled-up paper bag, and I can see that she has been crying. She turns back and begins animatedly making another point, gesturing backwards from where they’ve come, as if every square of sidewalk is a marker to a moment in their conversation, a tangible space that is keeping those words.

  I hold back, matching my pace to theirs so I can keep enough people between us that I could believably fake startle and run over if they do happen to see me. Noah looks equally upset, stretching his corduroy jacket over his thin shoulders as he crosses his arms over his chest. She touches his upper arm, but he doesn’t move any closer toward her, and she pulls back her hand, jamming it into her pocket.

  I stop walking, edging behind a group of tourists all snapping pictures of a bronze George Washington riding his horse. I have known Arianna for so long that I know all of her choreography, the way she flicks the ends of her hair while she twirls the rest tightly around her index finger. The way she raises her eyebrows while she’s listening, her face a mask of disbelief even when she ultimately ends up apologizing or agreeing with you. The way her hands automatically go to the necklace she bought herself when Beckett was born.

  Based on the way they’re holding their bodies, it looks as if they are breaking up. As if they are lovers who have decided that it’s time to part ways. Part of me feels relieved. This is exactly what I wanted to have happen for Ethan’s sake. Except as someone watching the scene unfold like a silent movie, it looks as if Noah is the one ending it, as if Arianna is angrily begging him to give their relationship one last chance. Their relationship. I think about my brother across the city, in a classroom teaching kids how to digitally alter their photographs. How would he Photoshop this image: Arianna leans her head into Noah’s chest, her face looking down at the sidewalk, and her shoulders shake as he strokes her hair, lowering his face slightly to breathe her in.

  My hand moves toward my phone in my pocket. My instinct is to record this moment, send it to Arianna and ask her what the hell she is doing, knowing Ethan would be gutted if he saw this. I don’t know what stops my hand, what makes me feel exactly as I did when Adam proposed post-shower, caught between twenty reactions at once and going with doing nothing rather than committing to any path.

  I realize that I am clutching my baguette like a shotgun, and I release my arm that has squeezed a small ridge into the bread. Maybe they are not breaking up at all. Maybe this is just a quarrel on a random sidewalk in New York. Fights happen, misunderstandings occur. I peek around the tourists to see if the top of her head is still touching his chest, but they’re back in deep conversation. Arianna’s hair falls forward like a curtain between us, veiling her face. She pokes him in the chest a few times, and Noah throws up his hands as he shouts back, loud enough that even I can hear what he’s saying over the conversations around us, the car horns, and the wind. I’m sorry if that’s what you thought, but I never saw things that way. He lowers his voice and leans forward to continue the thought, but Arianna takes a step back, her face contorted in pain, as if she is giving birth to herself.

  There is a part of me that wants to charge forward, to smack him with my grocery bags, especially the one that contains the heavy glass jar of barley malt syrup. That would definitely leave a bruise across his bony hips. I want to hurt him for upsetting my friend; I want to go link my arm through Arianna’s, putting myself protectively between them while I tell him exactly what I think of him before leading Arianna away to the nearest coffeehouse so she can cry, and we can both verbally tear Noah to shreds.

  But this isn’t my fight to have, and Arianna is a grown woman who doesn’t need my protection any more so than Ethan. All she needs from me is to take her side when she comes to the party tonight. That is my job as her friend. I start to guiltily back away, determined to leave all my judgments in Union Square and not let her know that I observed any of this.

  But I can’t help but see before Noah walks away that he touches her cheek very gently and then leans in to kiss her, the softest brush of his lips against hers. But her mouth doesn’t respond. Her lips are shaking, catching the tears that have started moving from the corners of her eyes down her cheeks, her eyes closed tightly so she doesn’t see him walk away.

  I CAN’T STOP thinking about the kiss as I get ready to go out. Adam sprawls across our bed, half-pretending that he’s not watching me get dressed and half-reading the latest issue of the New Yorker. I already know what he’ll say—that I shouldn’t have followed Arianna to begin with. I should have stayed up in the Whole Foods with Mr. Scandinavian History and finished my muffin.

  “I followed Arianna today,” I blurt out, setting down my tube of lipstick. Adam looks up from his magazine.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I was in Whole Foods, and I saw Noah and Arianna having a fight. Actually, it looked like they were just having this intense discussion, but then it turned into a fight. I saw them kiss.”

  Adam is silent and then looks down at the New Yorker cartoon, as if he is taking a moment in the middle of my confession to suss out why a dog in a smoking jacket might be amusing. “They were kissing in the Whole Foods?”

  “They were kissing in Union Square. Well, really he was kissing her. She didn’t really kiss back,” I admit.

  “You didn’t tell Ethan, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t tell Ethan,” I snap, jerking open my dresser drawer and looking for the bra I like to wear with this particular top. “I’m not going to tell Ethan. I’m telling you because I was bothered by it.”

  “What about it bothered you?” Adam asks, closing the magazine.

  “Everything. Everything about it bothered me. From Ari being upset by whatever Noah was saying to her to the fact that she is essentially having an affair on my brother.”

  “Rachel, she is not having an affair on your brother, and it’s not fair of you to judge her like that. I’ve been telling you from the start not to get involved, that you have no idea what you’re seeing. All you know is that your friend is hanging out with this guy, who may or may not be just a friend. You saw them have a fight, and you apparently saw him kiss her, and you’re jumping all the way over to an affair based on those small pieces of information.”

  “How else am I supposed to view that? Please come up with a situation where they aren’t romantically involved.”

  “Well, you start with the fact that you know that Arianna is a good person with her heart in the right place, and she is not going to purposefully set out to hurt your brother. And then you look at the facts as we know them: Arianna has been spending time with a guy named Noah. She has even brought Ethan and her friends aroun
d him, so it’s not as if she’s hiding him. People sometimes have arguments, and you witnessed them having one today. And then he kissed her, and I didn’t observe the kiss, so I’m not sure if you’re talking about a quick goodbye kiss or something else.”

  I stop rooting around in the drawer for my bra and turn around to touch my hand gently to Adam’s cheek. He smiles at me, misunderstanding what I’m doing, and I lightly touch my lips to his, moving my head back and forth so that my lower lip brushes his own. “That’s what I saw. That’s how he kissed her. Stroking her cheek while she cried.”

  Adam doesn’t say anything for a bit. I get off the bed and walk into the bathroom to finish doing my hair. He comes over and leans in the doorway as I bring a flatiron across a lock of hair from the root to the end. “Here’s what I don’t get. It almost seems as if you want to think the worst about Arianna rather than giving her the benefit of the doubt. I’m not calling you a bad friend, Rach, or telling you that you’re crazy for thinking that something is going on. But every time I offer out the possibility that their relationship is innocent, you brush it aside and assume the worst possible scenario.”

  I bite my lip, realizing that Adam is completely correct. I have been judging Arianna ever since she first told me about Noah, and I’ve written it off as being due to her relationship with Ethan. That I am just trying to look out for my brother. I don’t answer Adam. I keep my eyes trained on the doubtful expression reflected back at me in the mirror.

  “Let’s say that Arianna does have a crush on this man—who is to say that she acted on those feelings? I trust Arianna, and I think that regardless of how it looks from the outside, I’m choosing to believe that she has made decisions that at least respect Ethan until we learn otherwise.”

  “Don’t you think that having a crush on another person, in and of itself, shows a lack of respect?” I question. “Do you have a crush on someone, and you’re trying to justify it?”

  “Jesus Christ, Rachel. No, I don’t have a crush. You are the one who is having a problem with our relationship, not me.” He pauses to let his words sink in, almost as a reminder that even though we’re dissecting Arianna and Ethan’s relationship, he hasn’t forgotten about my cold feet. “But really, how is Arianna fawning over Noah any different from you mooning over George Clooney?”

  “It’s a hundred percent different!” I shout, pointing my hot flat iron at him. He jumps out of the way, even though it misses his chest by a good two feet. “I have no chance of meeting George Clooney. He isn’t real.”

  “Of course he’s real,” Adam admonishes. “He is an actual human being, and we live in Manhattan where plenty of movies are filmed. There is a chance that one day, you’ll be walking through Soho and you’ll happen upon him.”

  “Noah Reiser is an actual person who Arianna actually knows, not a remote entity that she will probably never meet. It is different. And if I saw George Clooney, I would ask if we could take a picture together, but I wouldn’t start going out to coffee with him.”

  “Oh, come on,” Adam says, moving back to his post in the doorway. “I don’t believe that for a second. If you met him, you’d most certainly be doing whatever Mr. Clooney invited you to do. The point I was trying to make is that I don’t feel threatened or jealous of George Clooney. Okay, maybe I covet his Italian lake house, but I don’t care that you drag me to every one of his movies on opening night. I don’t sit there wondering if it means that you love me less if you’re getting all glassy-eyed in the theater. There is a huge difference between infatuation and love, and while I don’t enjoy the idea of you being infatuated with someone else, it scares me less than if you fell in love. You don’t know George Clooney. What you feel for him isn’t based in any reality; it’s entirely set in what you think he might be like.”

  “And you think that what Arianna feels is just infatuation?”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m saying that we don’t know what she’s feeling, and assuming that it’s something more than infatuation based on the facts as we know them is a very pessimistic look at their relationship. At all relationships. It’s almost as if you’re using Arianna to make some point that all relationships go to shit.”

  “Don’t they?” I ask, my voice unnaturally high. I blink rapidly, even knowing that I opted for waterproof mascara. “Not every relationship, but I’m being realistic.”

  “No,” Adam counters. “You’re being scared. There is a big difference between being realistic and being scared, and you are terrified that just maybe, everything will work out all right in the end with us despite our divorce.”

  “Actually, I’m terrified that things will not work out all right in the end, and that we’re being foolish to not see the clear signs all around us. Adam, I am absolutely positive about you. I have never wavered on how I feel about you, the immense love I feel for you. But I do not trust marriage the way you trust marriage. Maybe I see the worst in Arianna because the worst possible explanation has just as much a chance of being right as the best possible explanation.”

  “I don’t trust marriage,” Adam tells me. “I trust you. And I wish you trusted yourself too.”

  Adam runs his fingers through his hair, tugging at the roots as if he’s trying to lift off the lid of a box. “I don’t care,” he finally says, “what is happening with Arianna and Ethan. Their choices don’t reflect on our truth. But you need to stop mixing yourself up in their problems and making them ours. I’m done with waiting, Rach, and I thought after all of your time on the sofa back when I worked eighteen hour days that you were done too. I am giving you what I thought you wanted based on what drove us apart the first time. I am committed to you, I am ready for you, I am never going to ask you to wait again. And now you need to decide if what you thought you wanted is what you really want.”

  His words are like this time when I was little, when my parents took me to their law partner’s working farm out near Pennsylvania. The kids ran around in the barn while the adults drank wine and commented on the setting. The barn had contained a rope tied to the rafters, and we took turns sailing over the hay-covered floor from a set of stacked bales to a large, soft pile of the sweet-smelling grass. I had climbed up on the bales, which looked much shorter when standing on the floor than when I got up top, and I considered chickening out and climbing back down. Some of the older kids had shouted at me to take my turn already, and Sarah cupped her hands around her mouth and called out, “You can do it, Rach.” I felt myself take that first step into the air, into nothingness, and then I was sailing over the floor, my stomach lurching toward my throat, my hands gripping the rope so tightly that I thought I’d end up needing to pull tiny shards of the rough fibers from my skin. And then I landed in the soft hay, like falling onto pillows—which was strange when I picked up a piece and realized how sharp the dried grass was individually. But altogether, it was soft and cool, and I allowed myself to sink down into it and feel cradled despite the older kids telling me that it was time for me to get out of the way, time for the next person to go.

  LISBETH’S SUPER-SECRET bachelorette party location turns out to be a warmly lit room in the back of the restaurant Voi, done up in shades of black and red, containing four small square tables, two of which have been pushed together to accommodate the five of us. The room is attached to a slightly larger kitchen, which runs adjacent to the restaurant’s main kitchen and contains all the various stations we can see on the other side except more compact in size.

  Paulo, the incredibly gorgeous chef with coffee-colored eyes, informs us that Voi is a two-year-old working Italian restaurant that houses a separate space that can be reserved for cooking demonstrations and parties. Tonight, he has prepared a small menu of Northern Italian cuisine that he is going to teach us how to cook.

  “We’re going to cook?” I ask doubtfully, wondering if by “we” he means himself in the collective sense. But Lisbeth claps her hands and laugh
s.

  “Isn’t this a fantastic idea? Because you love to cook, and we love you.”

  I do love to cook, so I can’t really explain why this idea falls flat for me. It may have something to do with the fact that I’ve been cooking all day. It could be because I expected to relax, to be pampered and celebrated, not asked to cook my own meal. I am well-aware of the cooking limitations of my bridal party, which means that the bulk of the work is going to fall to me since I’m the only one of us who has taken it upon herself to break free of the carryout menu chains. With all of my relationship and friendship anxiety rattling around in my brain, I can barely concentrate on making small talk much less follow someone else’s recipe and hold a knife. But Lisbeth is clearly so excited with her surprise that I throw my arms around her and congratulate her on her brilliance.

  We follow Paulo back into the kitchen where he gives us each an apron embroidered with the name of the restaurant and shows us where we can wash our hands.

  “I just want it said,” Emily whispers to me as she lathers her hands like a surgeon, “that this was Arianna’s idea. I told her that this was like asking me to look at mammogram films for my bachelorette party. I voted for the spa night.”

  I nod, as if I have vast experience with breasts and this analogy while I watch Arianna examine the cream-colored pieces of paper Paulo is passing out on the other side of the kitchen. She looks subdued, calm after a long cry, her eyes still puffy, at least to someone who knows her face as well as I do. Who knows Arianna’s mood based on the tightness of the hair wrapped around her finger. I can’t imagine she’s excited to be cooking.

  I sigh as I run my hands in the water, almost feeling as if this piece of information is one more tally mark—a diagonal cross over four parallel lines keeping track of all the ways Arianna and I don’t know each other anymore. We’re like a foreign language we once spoke as a child, which sounds familiar but is no longer understandable beyond a few common phrases.