by Kim Ross
11
Jeremy’s revelation opens up some questions – if he really did find something to expose at the end of his article series, if he got fired for it and there are suits coming to check up on him and make sure he stays quiet, what else might be real? I shake my head. The world is a nasty place with those in power doing everything they can to stay in control. The kinds of things that the government has been doing openly since 9/11 would have been the subject of conspiracies a decade ago. When stories about warrantless wiretaps or the government requesting a backdoor to Facebook or whatever surface, we don’t even bat an eyelash anymore. Hell, it’s only been a few months since the last time a college student found a federal issue GPS tracker under his car and nobody cares. The only reason that a coverup like the one Jeremy seems to be involved in is interesting is because it’s relatively new. It’s not morally or legally worse than anything we’re happy to appease.
Also if it was the kind of thing I really needed to worry about he’d have been killed.
Our trip back to work is a comic antonym of our journey out. Before we were all giggles and sunshine. Now we travel in silence, Jeremy undoubtedly caught up in his conspiracy, me praying he didn’t remember what we were doing before that came up. Luckily it’s a short trip so the constant press of work soon drags us out of our collective dread.
Phil’s at my desk, which isn’t a surprise, but it’s a little weird that we stepped out for twenty minutes and he picks the exact time we get back to hover over me and micromanage.
“The K-pop article failed the marketing test,” he says. “A couple of their big labels just signed giant ad contracts and we’re doing talks with a third. Tony says we can run the story intact in a few months but in the meantime you can use a lot of that cultural stuff for a generic piece on international music. How everyone seems to copy the US scene and sing in English and stuff. You’ve probably got half an article worth of that stuff that you can recycle here.”
“When do you need it?” I ask glumly.
Phil grins. “Monday,” he says. He slinks back to his lair.
I crash in my chair and spin around in agony. “That was a good article, too,” I tell Jeremy.
Still, this could have ended a lot worse.
12
I spend the rest of the day frantically accumulating sources for what has to be the worst fluff piece I’ve ever written. There’s maybe a paragraph worth of content for every page of article, made even worse by Phil’s sudden e-mail saying he wants four pages of content (which is absurd for about fifty reasons). Jeremy is helpful but distant. I can’t blame him, but I’ve decided I don’t care what he thinks about anything at this point. Phil relies on me for a lot of things. I’m not going to get replaced overnight without some pretty clear signals beforehand.
I make a show of changing my mind back and forth regarding dinner with Max but I have trouble convincing my audience of one. I’m going back to Max. I’ve known all week that if he gave me a chance I’d come running; now that he’s made this opening my play is predetermined. I’m not sure exactly what we’ll say over dinner – certainly there will be some things to be said – but I haven’t even gotten my stuff from his place yet. I’m clearly not ready to move on. We’ll be able to set aside our issues with the relationship and carry on. Hopefully.
In truth, I have no idea how he sees things. He might just want to say goodbye in a more dignified manner. This uncomfortable tidbit manifests as a faint gnawing sensation in my gut, the only thing that makes me actually want to skip dinner. I don’t actually have a say in what Max has decided. That’s the part that makes relationships great, right? The part where the other person is unpredictable and irrational and does things you hate. It’s all about contrast, as Renee would say. You have to have bads to bring out the goods.
In fairness, I don’t think Renee would ever use that cliché about life experiences in that kind of a general sense or even about relationships, just about volume or colors or some other boring artistic thing in some meaningless statement trying to explain her complete lack of taste regarding everything. Still, I have to try to rationalize this somehow. I can’t quite live with the idea that the world creates pain randomly, for no reason.
I stay at work a bit later than usual to submit a draft of the article before the weekend. I’ve got plenty of time before Phil needs it, but given all the other shit I’m dealing with in my life it’s nice to get this one thing under control. This results in me leaving a bit late to go to Max’s, but I’m sure he’ll understand.
Or, of course, I’m trying to sabotage my chance at getting back together with him.
I manage to suppress the sudden desire to take a shortcut I know won’t work and wind up arriving about 15 minutes late. I’m more nervous about this than I have been about anything in a while. The walk up our driveway – his driveway – is accompanied by a cacophony of chemical sensations flooding every receptor in my brain; it’s not altogether unfamiliar but somewhat unexpected considering I’ve spent the better part of half a year living here.
He hasn’t changed anything, as far as I can tell. This is neither good, bad, nor surprising. The screen door is impossibly imposing. I feel like Aragorn at the gates of Mordor. Just because I’m doing the right thing doesn’t mean it’s easy.
He opens the door before I can knock, although I’m not really sure how long I was standing there. I catch a whiff of sautéed onions and romantic candles. He’s gone all out, it seems – he’s got the table all fancied up and he’s cooking as seriously as I’ve ever seen him, with little bowls for ingredients and a silly apron and everything. There’s a wine on the table -- something expensive, I’m sure, but neither of us really cares so it’s likely he just asked a friend.
I can’t help but dread that he’s done all of this to say goodbye with a little more elegance.
“Come in,” he says, opening the door. “Food’s almost ready. I figured you might be late based on your text .”
I think if I had called I wouldn’t have been able to bring myself to come at all. Seeing him in person is almost unbearable. I tell myself that he’s already made up his mind either way; that there’s nothing here for me to fuck up, but I can’t shake the feeling that if I puke on his doorstep and leave that I can put off this climax for as long as I can ignore his calls and texts and then we’ll be like this forever, not really broken up.
Not really together, either. I squeeze my baggage in through the door.
We don’t touch. Max has never really been big on casual physical intimacy in private, which is to say if we’re alone and outside of the bedroom we don’t cuddle or hold hands or kiss or anything. Usually I’m fine with this – it’s preferable to having a clingy guy, for sure, and he’s fine with whatever as long as I initiate – but it means I can’t read him right now. He’s content to go back to cooking for now. I ignore my sudden desire to pee – I’m not going to hide in the bathroom all evening – and sit down while he finishes up.
We make the smallest of small talk as he cooks. His body language is entirely neutral – he seems a bit tense but that could very easily be me imagining things, and I don’t know if that means he wants me in or out, so I do my best to ignore it. Still, I find my eyes darting about his face, watching his hands, hoping for the slightest glimmer of insight that might let slip his intentions.
“How’s work?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say. “I just spent two days on an article to have it delayed by a few months by marketing so we don’t piss off a potential advertiser.”
“About what?” he says, his tone halfway between genuine care and complete disinterest.
“Korean music. Phil wanted a little article on some pop group that wants to sell albums stateside but Jeremy helped me come up with a bunch of data on how the whole industry’s a mess.”
He stops suddenly, putting down everything before he turns to me. “Was that the guy from yesterday?” he asks, coolly.
I force myself to meet his ey
es. “Nothing happened,” I say. “Jeremy’s a new hire –“
“I know,” Max says. “You’ve been talking about him for at least two weeks. I just wanted to know if –“
“Nothing happened,” I repeat.
He goes back to cooking. “You realize we were broken up, right?” he asks. “It doesn’t matter if anything happened. We’ve talked about this.”
We had, but we decided during a similar talk that if he got more hours we would break up and here I am pining after Max a week later. “Then why did you want to know if it was him?” I ask, not wanting to discuss the real issue.
It works as a deflection. He’s silent for a bit. When we pick up the conversation again we don’t skirt the topic of our relationship: we stay miles away. Still, there are overtones in every subject, and I can’t help but feel tense and detached from anything that comes up.
Every word grates: from annoyance that we’re not dealing with it, from fear that he might reject me, and because with the amount of stress I’m under, having to carry on a conversation is tortuous. I manage to make it through – we manage to make it through, I suppose; he must be just as on-edge as I am – and after a dozen eternities, we’re sitting down to eat.
“I thought about our earlier discussion regarding long-distance,” Max says, finally.
I smile and nod, hardly daring to breathe.
“There’s a guy on our team – Ramirez, he’s one of our linemen – who isn’t very trusting. Or smart. No matter what you tell him he won’t believe you until he experiences things for himself. He came in as a freshman tackling wrong. We told him he could break his arm if he didn’t change things. He didn’t believe us. It took a week before he ended up in the hospital with a shattered wrist.”
I bury my hands in my lap and clench my knees. He’s right. There’s no way this can work. It seems so stupid and unfair.
“That’s us right now,” he continues. “We’ve been told exactly what will happen – we understand exactly what will happen – and we still want to go through with this.”
I’m trying my best not to cry in front of him.
“I’ve been thinking about this all week,” he says, slowly. “I finally asked Ramirez why he never believed us when we told him things.”
“Because he’s an idiot,” I say.
“He said, ‘Coach, there’s just some things in life you gotta try. You can’t go through life trying not to make mistakes. You just gotta make sure that the ones you make are worth it.’”
“Breaking his arm for a tackle was worth it?”
“It secured us a spot in the playoffs last year,” Max says. He pauses and looks at me for a second. I can hardly dare to breathe. “I think that making the mistake of trying to make you happy for as long as I can is worth it,” he finishes.
I catch a glimpse of happiness before it crumbles. This is exactly what I’ve been dying to hear him say for days, but when he says it, all I’m left with is this terrible bitter sinking feeling. It’s like all of my uncertainties about this relationship came bubbling up at once, now that I’ve made up my mind to commit to it. We don’t do this kind of thing, Max and I. We’ve avoided such sappy romantic idealism and stuck to logical analysis and discussion and openness. If we get back together under these terms, it won’t be the relationship we had. We’ll be throwing away all that we’ve worked for all these months when we solved our problems rationally, together. This is Max throwing his heart at me and hoping for the best. This is the kind of thing we both hate.
Tiffany would have a field day with this. When I was moping around this week or daydreaming about this exact moment earlier today I didn’t care about any of this stuff. I just wanted Max back. Now that he’s within my reach, I don’t want him. My guidance system is tragically human. Goal is possible; abort mission, it says. Go fail at something else.
Just like that, everything snaps into place. I’m enlightened; I’ve hooked into the Cerebro of my love life and I’m finally understanding the shape of it all. I’ve never had the goal of staying with Max. He was the one who was out of my league and not my type when I was on a slump and I’ve been trying to make him dump me ever since. Everything that worked about our relationship was the result of a desperate battle between my rational side and my subconscious desire for failure, with Max being far more reasonable about the whole thing than he had any right to be. We didn’t work out because of our rules and open discussions about everything, we worked out in spite of them – maybe not in spite, perhaps, since our understanding of how each other felt certainly helped when we did get into fights, but I certainly didn’t enter into a lengthy discussion of marriage on our second date with any of that in mind. Part of me just wanted him to dump me so I could go back into my slump. Not because I enjoyed sitting alone on the couch eating ice cream and watching sitcom reruns, but because it was safe. Because I never had to worry about being rejected, or having to work to accommodate someone else, or be embarrassed about my habits or concerned what anyone thought about anything at all.
I’ve gotten a taste of that again over the past few days. Jeremy was cute, sure, but he wouldn’t challenge me. I decided I wanted our brief fling to happen. I was in charge the entire time. I was the one who called it off. At no point would I have ever had to make any sort of effort to do anything to maintain a relationship with him: he was a toy. I would have discarded him when I grew tired of playing. I might have gone through some of the motions of pretending to care, perhaps, but it would have been purely for the sake of performance.
What Max is asking me to do is to go back to what’s probably been the only two sided, adult relationship I’ve had in my life. I’m scared.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I say, slowly.
“So we’re back together?” he asks.
I only hesitate for a split second. “Yes.”
Max smiles. He looks incredibly relieved.
“I’m glad I never got my stuff out,” I say. It’s a bit of an effort not to bolt, but I’ve been dealing with harder challenges all my life. Forcing myself to make good decisions is easy by comparison.
“So what happened with Jeremy?” Max says.
“He turned out to be a bit less of a jerk than I thought previously and I was on rebound,” I say. “You interrupted us before anything actually happened between us.”
I catch the briefest glimpse of anger on Max’s face as he composes a response, but it fades quickly. “I meant at work,” he said. “We were broken up; I would be an idiot if I held any grudges over your sex life during the past week. What did he do that made him seem less like an asshole?”
“You don’t believe me,” I say.
“I’ve said like three times I don’t care what happened,” Max says.
“You wouldn’t keep bringing it up if you actually didn’t care. You’re emotionally invested. That’s okay. Nothing happened, really. I wouldn’t lie to you like that.”
Max shakes his head. “I really don’t care. You can tell me if something happened, but I’d rather you keep it to yourself.”
This is incredibly frustrating. “I just –“
“I don’t want to know,” he says.
“—told you exactly what happened,” I say, ignoring him. “Why don’t you believe me?”
“Why do you care if I believe you if I’m okay with it?” he says.
“Because we’ve always been about trust and honesty and talking our way through these things,” I say. “What changed?”
“We talked about things honestly and decided to break up,” Max says. “Remember? We weren’t working.”
“We weren’t working? That’s news to me. I thought you just got a promotion so you didn’t think you’d be able to dedicate enough time to the relationship.”
Max stares intently at his plate.
“Was that why we were breaking up?” I ask, suddenly furious. “Was it because you thought we weren’t working and not because we wouldn’t have any time together?”
/> “It was mostly because we wouldn’t have any time,” Max says, slowly.
“Mostly?”
“I’ve just been really unsatisfied lately. I’ve been juggling too many things.”
“You think I’m a ball you can drop?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says, flustered. “I just feel like I’m not able to put enough time into everything that matters.”
“So you’re saying I don’t matter.”
“You matter a lot, I just feel like I can’t afford to take time away from other things to spend it with you.”
“So I don’t matter.”
Max is getting more agitated by the minute. “Look, I’m not going to quit my job for you, okay?” he says. “That’s what it’s coming down to. I have a finite amount of time. I can either work or spend it with you, and if I don’t attend to one for twenty hours a day I lose it. I’ve been catching a lot of flak lately from the rest of the staff about how I’m not spending as much time at work as they are. My job is great. This is what I’ve wanted to do my whole life – I’ve got a great position on a great team, I make good money, and I love what I do. I’m not willing to give that up right now. Not for you.”
“This has never been a problem before,” I say.
“This has always been a problem,” he says. “There’s a reason all the other guys at work are either single or married. I’ve been constantly catching flak at work since we started dating. I’ve just gotten tired of dealing with it.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because you’ve been worth it,” he says.
“Which is why you dumped me,” I say, holding my ground. I’m not going to let him make my emotions go all topsy-turvy that easily.
“There was a roadblock in our relationship and I couldn’t find a way around it,” he says. “I was already time crunched and I’m going to be working more in the future. What did you expect me to do?”
“So what changed?” I ask. I find myself incredibly nervous suddenly. I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming up.
