Once More With Feeling

by Megan Crane

  ‘You never forgave yourself,’ Brooke said again, a matching sort of misery in her own eyes as she looked back at me, as if, even now, after all this time, she still loved me enough that she would spare me this if she could, ‘and so I guess you decided it was easier to become somebody else. So you could stop trying.’

  9

  Later on, when we’d given up on restaurant ideas and had ordered a pizza instead, like one of our run-of-the-mill evenings in our tiny walk-up in Alphabet City, we tucked into the bottle of wine and pretended that all of that emotion, all of it repressed yet simmeringly obvious, hadn’t happened. Or hadn’t mattered.

  Then again, maybe that was just me. The list of things I didn’t particularly want to think about seemed to grow longer by the day.

  The familiar debate over whether to go out or order in, and then where to order from, seemed to take away the heaviness of our initial conversation. Or ease it, anyway. That was either a great relief or a terrible mistake, and I wasn’t at all sure which.

  ‘Tim did not make me a Stepford wife,’ I informed Brooke after the initial pizza frenzy had subsided and we’d shoved half the pie in our faces. I was half-lying on her couch, no longer all too terribly concerned about the wine glass in my hand. I felt too full and slightly blurry, and I was sure that was what made me sound so much less defensive than I did in my head. ‘I’m the one who decided that he was the right guy for me, not the other way around. Just to be clear.’

  Brooke cackled, that wicked little sound I hadn’t heard in too many years to count, and it made me inordinately happy – even if she was aiming it at me in this instance. She scraped her long hair back with one hand while she took a bite of her slice of now-cold pizza from the other.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. Ever so slightly patronizingly, I felt, though I was aware that I could easily be projecting all my left-over, repressed emotions into this moment. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I really appreciate you telling me how you think all of that went down,’ I continued, choosing to ignore her tone. ‘How you saw it. And I appreciate you wearing that bridesmaid’s dress at my wedding. I do. But Tim is not some bastion of evil. You can’t hate him because he used to be a corporate lawyer and we used to be significantly more bohemian. Or whatever you want to call those years.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Her tone was richly amused then. Her dark brows arched skyward. ‘I’m sure I remember that we made specific rules. There were to be no stuffy lawyers when you took that job. It was supposed to be about your student loans, not hooking up with The Man.’

  ‘The truth is that I totally misjudged Tim when I first met him, and so did you.’ I sat up a little bit, the better to frown at her. ‘And weren’t you dating that tragic musician right around then? What was his name? Lloyd?’

  ‘Boyd, actually,’ she corrected me, with an air of great dignity somewhat marred by her smirk. She waved her half-eaten pizza slice in the air as punctuation. ‘And he was not a musician, Sarah. He was a conceptual artist whose medium happened to be the architecture of sound. God.’

  ‘If you want to talk about sleeping with the enemy, I think it all starts there,’ I argued, unable to wholly contain what I suspected was a matching smirk. ‘We made vows, Brooke. There were to be no more musicians past the quarter century mark and you were twenty-six. Twenty-seven? Whatever. You broke the rules before I did.’

  ‘These would all be fair and interesting points if this discussion was about the inevitable decline of my relationship with Boyd the so-called musician and his lame bicep tattoo of Joe Camel.’ She shuddered theatrically. ‘Thank God, it’s not.’

  ‘Maybe it should be,’ I said stubbornly. ‘I think it’s relevant.’

  ‘Boyd was irrelevant even as he happened, and completely forgettable almost before he disappeared into the mists of Bowery Bar, never to be heard from again,’ she said, still waving her slice of pizza around over the white box splayed open on the glass table in front of her. ‘He probably sells car insurance in some place like Poughkeepsie. No one’s cared about Boyd in years. Why don’t you tell me how we misjudged Tim?’

  She took another huge bite of her pizza, and I paused to think again how great it felt to be with someone I had been so comfortable with for so long, so that it was so easy simply to snap back into the habit. Even with all the things I didn’t want to think or feel swirling around underneath. How good it felt to be with someone who could say we and make me wish there had never been such a big gap between us. There had been no debate over our pizza order, no polite compromising over toppings neither one of us loved but thought we could live with for the sake of harmony. There was no need.

  Brooke had ordered the same pepperoni, garlic and black olive pizza we’d lived on way back when. Extra large. She didn’t even ask. And I loved every bite of it, no compromise necessary. Tim tended to be a little bit of a health nut who saved the pizza ordering for extremely special occasions, like maybe twice a year, and preferred a vegetable-heavy pizza that he could pick from and thereby pretend he was eating a salad. I’d missed the full assault of grease and garlic. I’d missed the tang of good New York City pepperoni and that perfect thin crust, crunchy and chewy at the same time, which was impossible to get quite right anywhere else. The fact that I was so full I wanted to die didn’t in any way prevent me from scooping up another slice.

  ‘He’s not the guy you thought he was,’ I told her. My tone was light, but I hadn’t forgotten our previous conversation. Much less the way it had hit me. But we’d moved out of that particular space, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back there. Too much lurked there, just out of sight, which was right where I liked it. Even so, I felt sure I could clear up a few misconceptions without treading too far into that territory. ‘He’s really not.’

  ‘Then who is he?’ Brooke asked in that very nearly plummy voice that made me want to spill everything, even things I hadn’t told myself. I had a sudden vision of her in some leather editorial chair in her office, dispensing serenity to packs of excitable writer types in exactly the same tone of voice. She’d always had a version of it at her disposal, but I could recognize that the passing years had honed it, perfected it. Made it into something very much like a weapon. ‘You refused to talk about it back then. It was like you’d decided he was it and that was the end of it, no discussion allowed.’

  She didn’t say that one of the reasons that had struck her so hard was because our lives until then had been one great shared discussion, with no end in sight. There was no detail too small or seemingly meaningless to keep to ourselves – no minor moment that we couldn’t obsess over and tear apart and dissect for days. It was our currency. More than that, it was how we talked our world into being around us as we moved through it. It was how we decided who we were. I understood exactly what I’d done by cutting that off. By amputating what we’d been – and I hadn’t asked Brooke or warned her that I wanted to do it, needed to do it; I’d just gone ahead and done it. There was a part of me that still felt guilty about that, no matter how necessary I’d long since convinced myself it was.

  ‘He had a plan,’ I said at last, almost helplessly, trying to fit all of the things that I knew about Tim into a simple description that might help her see him, too. The way I had, even if that had gone bad all these years later. That didn’t change what he’d been to me then. I wouldn’t let it. I shrugged. ‘I wanted a plan.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ She rolled her eyes, and God knew, she was good at rolling her eyes. She could say more with an artful eye roll than some people could say in whole, dense lectures. This particular one said a great deal, none of it complimentary about Tim. ‘I have a plan right now. I want to eat the rest of this pizza and then figure out the chocolate situation, and I will execute that plan. That doesn’t make me anything but a little obsessive and overinvolved with my food.’

  ‘I thought he was cute,’ I said then, around another huge bite of pizza. ‘I still think he’s cute. Yes, even now. I liked how he could make everyone
in any room stop and listen to him, simply by talking about whatever he happened to be talking about. It’s like he was a little more than everybody around him. He had a spark, or something.’ I anticipated her expression more than saw it. ‘His eyes were so blue and when he looked at me, I really believed that he would love me forever. I really, truly believed it. And that, because he was Tim, and the particular kind of guy he was, he would take care of me forever, too.’

  There were so many parts of him that I’d loved. That if I was honest, I still loved. It hadn’t all been turned off because I’d discovered the affair. It would be so much easier if it had been. And I missed those things, even now. Even here. His endearing meticulousness. His sense of order and how it should be imposed on the chaotic world around him. How strict he was with himself and his routines. What he ate, when he worked out. And the way that he could laugh at all those things, and admit that he was a little bit crazy, and he liked himself that way. It’s what makes me a good lawyer, he’d told me once. I’ve never met a client as crazy as I think I am, which means I’m always three steps ahead.

  I’d always kind of loved how delighted by that he was. And I’d really loved that I wasn’t the crazy one, for once. It was amazing how much I’d loved that – and how different that dynamic had been from that of any other relationship I’d ever had.

  ‘I guess I never saw that part of him,’ Brooke was saying – carefully, I thought, but more or less sincerely. ‘I only saw that Wall Street wannabe thing and it didn’t make sense to me that you would choose that kind of guy. Not to marry.’

  ‘I was tired of playing games,’ I said, lifting my shoulders and then dropping them again. I thought of Alec and shoved that aside. Hard. There was no point dredging all of that up now, not when it was so far away, so beyond my reach. When he had been nothing but a lost cause from the start. There was no point and never had been, and I’d accepted that a long time ago, hadn’t I? Brooke had seen that as depression. I remembered it as realism. ‘I was tired of the same old guys with the same old stale promises. All those marginal, maybe sort of lives. Tim was a grown up. He knew exactly what he wanted and he wasn’t afraid to ask for it. He had a great job that he liked and was good at, and he wasn’t embarrassed to say so. He told me he wanted to marry me on our third date.’

  I smiled slightly, remembering that night vividly. He’d made me dinner at his place – an impressive gourmet meal in his beautiful, undeniably adult Upper West Side building complete with doormen, an elevator, and a kitchen that was not, in fact, a galley slapped on the wall of the living room. He’d kissed me and told me he thought he could marry me. When I’d only stared at him in response, he’d said that the truth was he wanted to marry me, and who cared if that might be rushing things because that was how he felt.

  There had been a time in my life when the fact that a man indicated interest in me would have been all the information I needed to do whatever he asked – but I’d never felt that kind of edgy desperation around Tim. Not once. I’d never felt wild and out of control with him – I’d felt calm. Like I didn’t have to make any decisions with him from a place of fear. That had felt revolutionary. I’d told him that marriage wasn’t something I could think about at that point in my life, that it was much too soon even to think about the conversation, and he’d smiled.

  I can wait, he’d said, his blue eyes clear. I’m in absolutely no rush, Sarah. I’m not going anywhere.

  There was no part of me that hadn’t loved that.

  ‘I liked it,’ I told Brooke now. ‘I liked knowing exactly where I stood with him – exactly how important I was to him.’ I caught her gaze then. ‘And I really, really liked being that important to somebody. Being a priority. So much so that he was perfectly happy to wait until I was ready to take our relationship to the next level. And he did.’

  Brooke pressed her lips together, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. Of course we were. Dr Alec Frasier. He had been noble and good. He saved lives. With his own hands. He was everything a hero should be – so handsome, so smart, so capable. God knew, I’d thought he was a hero come to life, even if he was markedly more gruff and irritable than heroes usually were in my fantasies.

  But heroes didn’t make particularly good boyfriends. Or at least, not for me. I had never felt in control with Alec. Not ever. He loved me, he’d said, but he wasn’t the marrying kind and anyway, there were worlds to save. He would love it if I came with him, he’d said, in his brusque, take-no-prisoners way – but that had to be my choice and yes, he’d be fine on his own. And no, he hadn’t been willing to wait.

  There had never been any solid ground to steady myself upon. Never any way to trust that I wasn’t the only reason we were together – that he would care or even notice if I stopped trying so hard. And after a while, life without a base, and without any kind of quantifiable future, became increasingly difficult to manage. Too difficult for me, anyway. Alec never made promises, he’d only offered me choices, and he’d demanded I make those choices alone.

  And more than all that, there would never, ever, be anything as important to him as his job. His beeper. Any woman who stayed with him would have had to accept that she would always come a distant second to his calling. A far distant second, if she even made the list when there was a crisis he had to handle. And the truth was, I couldn’t begrudge that. I didn’t. Every patient wanted her doctor to have the same work ethic as Alec had, the same level of total commitment. Especially a doctor like him, who’d had every intention of saving the world one third world country at a time. One epidemic at a time. With the force of his formidable will alone, if necessary.

  But I had been equally, heartbreakingly, sure that I was not that woman.

  And Tim had been a deep, beautiful breath of fresh air next to that goddam beeper.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Brooke said then, studying my face. She tucked her legs up beneath her on the couch. ‘You don’t seem angry at him. Shouldn’t you be?’

  ‘Alec?’ I hadn’t said his name out loud in such a long time, it felt like an incantation. As if I’d kicked up magic all around us, just by invoking him, and there would be a price for that kind of carelessness. There always was. I repressed a shiver. Brooke finished chewing her piece of pizza and eyed me as she licked her fingers.

  ‘Not Alec,’ she said gently. ‘Tim. That story you told me was all about Carolyn. How furious you are with her and all the crap she pulled at the hospital. Not that she’s not guilty here. You know I’ve never particularly loved her whole thing or the way she treats you. But he’s your husband. Isn’t his the greater betrayal?’

  I shifted against the couch, suddenly far more uncomfortable than the question probably warranted. How was I supposed to answer that? The truth was, I wasn’t sure I’d even thought about it in those terms. Lianne had, I knew. She held the two of them to be equally guilty. Any bonfires she built or face punches she dispensed were, she’d made it clear, to be shared between them.

  But I was less certain.

  ‘Carolyn’s known me since I was born,’ I pointed out, possibly hedging. ‘Tim’s only known me for the past seven years. I actually lived with Carolyn longer than I did with Tim, you know. If we’re counting things like that.’

  Brooke leaned forward and topped up her wine glass. She didn’t speak until she settled back against the couch again, and when she did, I got the sense that she had very carefully chosen not to say any number of things. It was as if those unspoken words hummed in the air between us.

  ‘Do you actually believe that?’ she asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer her and then shut it again. What did I believe? Shouldn’t I know? All I felt inside of me was the wine, the pizza and that great rage at Carolyn that nothing seemed to ease. Not even a little bit. And I didn’t feel that way about Tim.

  It wasn’t that I wasn’t angry at him – of course I was. Deeply, wildly angry. But it seemed that every time I started to fume, I fumed over her. Every time I thought abo
ut it, I thought about her. He was almost incidental to the situation. Was there something wrong with me for thinking that? He was the one who had made vows to me. He was the one who had broken them. Brooke was absolutely right.

  Why didn’t I focus on Tim instead? I realized as I asked myself this that I’d gone to great lengths to erase his part in all of this – even the scene I’d walked in on. I’d made this all about Carolyn’s evil clutches and had created some fantasy Tim, who’d blown into her talons like an easy summer breeze.

  But that wasn’t the Tim I knew. He was a planner. He plotted for years, he didn’t succumb to passion. He was tenacious and he waited. He had never toppled over weakly to anything in all the years I’d known him.

  It was possible that the sudden punch of nausea that made my stomach buckle was one reason why I’d avoided thinking about that.

  ‘I guess I don’t care that much about what happens to my relationship with Carolyn,’ I admitted after a while had passed and I was sure I’d keep my pizza down. Though it was a close call. ‘She’s always been so challenging. While some part of me really thought, for a long time after I walked in on them, that things would work out with Tim. I thought that right up until she told me she was pregnant and honestly? On some level I still thought it until I walked out of the hospital yesterday.’

  Brooke said nothing, and it felt like more of an indictment than if she’d unleashed the entire argument I was sure she was very carefully keeping to herself behind her calm exterior. Which was why I didn’t tell her that if I was completely honest, I still hadn’t given up on him. Not all the way. Not yet. It was that coma, I thought now. Again. I still believed that he could wake up a changed, penitent man. I still wanted him to do that, no matter that there was a baby now. I still wanted him to make this right.

  ‘Look,’ I said, restlessly fidgeting forward and up until I was on my feet. Then I had to face the fact that I didn’t have any idea what to do once I was standing. ‘We had a whole marriage. It wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t something I just made up in my head. It wasn’t settling, not the way you mean it when you say it.’