Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  If she was still seeing Andy, she thought, he would certainly give her some kind of present. It would be a present just to be with a man she loved at Christmas. But she did not think she would still be seeing him. She was certain that she would break off with him. Yet she thought about him constantly as she worked through the day.

  And that night, after the children were in bed, when she finally crawled into her own bed, exhausted from work and the bleakness of November and decongestant, Andy called.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Better,” Nell said. “A lot better, I guess. But tired.”

  “Too tired to talk?”

  “No, I guess not. Although I’m probably not going to be Miss Merry Sunshine,” Nell said.

  “Look,” Andy said. “Nell, you really left me hanging, just leaving me that way. You—”

  “Andy,” Nell interrupted, “I feel like you are always leaving me hanging.”

  “I am? How?” Andy asked. He sounded genuinely puzzled. “I don’t mean to,” he went on. “I always tell you I love you. I call you a lot. What more would you like for me to do?”

  Oh shit, Nell thought, this is so demeaning. “Andy,” she said. “Oh, Andy.” She was silent for a moment. Then she swallowed her pride. “Andy, I guess it’s that you and I mean different things when we say we love each other. I haven’t said ‘I love you’ to anyone except the children for years. It means so much to me. Part of what it means is—is that I want to live my life with you. I want to plan a future with you. I want to know what’s going to happen between us. If I didn’t love you, I could just go on day by day, without a commitment. But because I do love you—”

  They were both quiet for a while. Then Andy said, “No one can plan the future, Nell. You and I should both know that. We’ve both been married and divorced. We both know that there are no guarantees. There is no way to promise that anything will last. Can’t you just enjoy what we have now? It’s so good between us. And I do love you. I’m not going to wake up some day and not love you just because we haven’t made some kind of formal commitment to each other.”

  “But don’t you miss me?” Nell asked. “You seemed to like living with me this summer. You seemed happy. Wouldn’t you like us to live together, to be together more?”

  “Of course I would. That would be nice. But it’s not possible, is it? I don’t want to leave Nantucket, and you can’t leave Arlington. You’ve got your job there and your house and your children.”

  Nell was quiet. I could leave here if you’d ask me to come, she thought. If we were married. “I could give up a lot to be with you,” she said. “Oh, Andy, I miss you so much. It hurts me to be without you. Don’t you feel that at all?”

  “Well, I guess a little,” Andy said. “I love being with you. But I can’t say it hurts me when you’re not here. I’m so used to living alone, you see. I like living alone.”

  Well, Nell thought, I’ve known from the start he was painfully honest.

  “Well, it hurts me,” Nell said. “It hurts me a lot not to be with you. It hurts me a lot not to know how long we’ll be together. I want to plan. I want to trust. I want to have—Andy, I want to have a permanent relationship with you.”

  “But we don’t know that what we have is temporary,” Andy said. “No one is saying it’s temporary.”

  “And no one is saying it’s permanent,” Nell said.

  “But wouldn’t it be worse not to have it at all?” Andy asked. “Wouldn’t you be hurt more if we didn’t see each other at all? I don’t understand your reasoning.”

  “It’s not just reasoning,” Nell said. “It’s—feeling. And I guess I’ll have to decide whether or not it will hurt more to have you sometimes than to have you not at all.”

  “Oh, Nell,” Andy said. “I hope you make the right decision. I love you.”

  Nell wanted to throw the phone across the room and hit the wall. She wanted to throw the phone across the ocean and hit Andy in the head. She was frustrated: I hope you make the right decision. What a pompous thing that was for him to say! He was giving her no help at all. He was not giving her an inch. He was not going to commit himself. He would always expect her to continue with things as they were.

  “Anyway, it’s early to talk about the future, don’t you think?” Andy said. “We really haven’t known each other that long.”

  “I suppose,” Nell said. “I suppose. Look, Andy. I’m tired. These cold pills have wiped me out. Can we talk more another day?”

  He said of course, and Nell hung up the phone.

  Over the next two weeks they did talk to each other again, several times, but although the words varied slightly from time to time, the messages remained the same. Nell felt she was pushing for a commitment, and was demeaned to be doing it, and Andy did not respond in any way that helped. What it finally came down to was the sad truth that she really did love and need him more than he loved and needed her. She would have to decide if she could live with that.

  Thanksgiving weekend, the community theater had put on their first performance of Charley’s Aunt, but because she was in Nantucket, and then sick, Nell was unable to attend. But they put on their final series of performances the first weekend in December, and Nell took the children to the play one night and went by herself the last night, because she had been invited to the cast party.

  * * *

  It took all her courage to attend the party, and to stay there, because she was such an outsider. The party was held at the director’s home, and everyone else seemed to have been there before. Nell sat in a chair in a corner, sipping her champagne, watching all the others, who were extravagantly pleased with their play’s success. They talked to one another in an insider’s code, using lines from this play and others in their conversation and laughing hysterically at things that made no sense to Nell. Nell hadn’t felt so miserable and wallflowerish since she was twelve. At least thirty-five people crowded the room, all ages, actors and crew and friends and spouses, and although the costume designer had taken a few minutes at the beginning of the party to thank Nell for her help, after that no one had spoken to her very much at all. Nell felt like a fool. She felt her face sinking into lines of defeat, so that she had to work to look cheerful.

  She had vowed to herself before the party that she would stay for two hours no matter what, to give herself time to get to know people, that she would not be a coward and run away. But after an hour, she knew she couldn’t last. She didn’t blame these people, they were not being mean to her; they just had their own firmly set group, their own history, and they did not know her, and they did not need her. She would never try to work with them again. God, Nell thought, sitting there, how many dreams do I have to watch die? She thought she was being resilient, even valiant, to let go her dream of acting and settle for just working as part of the crew of a community theater company. But now she was seeing even that pathetic little hope fade in the laughter and smoke of this party. She knew she had to get out of the house and to her car before she burst into tears.

  “Hi,” someone said at her elbow. “How’re ya doing? I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Chris Hubbard. I did the lighting. You’re costumes, right?”

  Nell looked at Chris Hubbard. He was a hairy little guy with pockmarked skin and slicked-back hair; he had a sort of hoody allure about him. He was not the sort of man she would ordinarily be interested in—and as she studied his face, she felt even more despair, because this guy was only about thirty years old. I never want to meet another younger man in my life, Nell thought. Then she said to herself: Now look, he’s only being polite. You can at least be civil back. At least he’s talking to you.

  “I’m Nell St. John,” she said. “Yes, I helped with the costumes. The play went well, don’t you think?”

  They talked about the play for a while, and Chris told her about other productions they had put on and told her about some of the actors. He turned out to be articulate and clever and educated, which was a relief to N
ell. But as they talked, he let his eyes wander slowly over her body, his gaze resting on her bosom, then returning to her face. He seemed just the type of man who would say, “So, Nell, you want to fuck?”

  Instead, he said, “So, Nell, you want to go out sometime?”

  Nell looked at him. He was not as physically attractive as Steve or Stellios, but he was more intelligent, more on her intellectual level. He was not attractive, but on the other hand he was not repulsive. Through him she might get to know others in the theater company and be given an acting part. And if she were really going to break off with Andy, this Chris Hubbard character with his gangster face would at least be a human being she could spend time with.

  “Maybe,” she said. If only you were forty instead of thirty, she thought. “Yes,” she said, smiling. “All right. Sure.”

  They spent the next hour talking. When he told her he worked in a bookstore, he grew even more attractive to Nell. I don’t have to love every man I date, Nell thought. I may not even want to sleep with this guy. He might turn out to be a friend, and that would be great. When she dropped the news on him that she had two children who were ten and eight, he took it in his stride. When she told him she had to leave the party because of the babysitter, he took her phone number and suggested they get together after the holidays. He suggested a concert in Cambridge. Nell’s spirits improved even more: a concert, she thought. A concert, not a Clint Eastwood movie or a bike rally, but a concert.

  But when she got into her Toyota and began the drive home, her spirits plummeted again. She was so tired of men, so tired of the futile little dance of meeting and mating and running away. And she was so tired of young men, because that always meant to her a brief and doomed relationship. And she was so damn tired of herself for wanting, always wanting more than a brief and doomed relationship. She cried all the way home. It seemed she was crying a lot these days.

  Nell had invited Clary to spend Christmas with them and Clary had eagerly accepted, but ten days before Christmas, Clary called Nell at the boutique.

  * * *

  “Can we have dinner tonight?” Clary asked. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” Nell said. “Come on over. I don’t know what we’re having, but there’ll be enough for—”

  “No, no,” Clary said. “I mean let’s go out for dinner. Let’s get fancy. My treat.”

  “What’s happened?” Nell snapped, alerted by Clary’s tone of voice. She could hear Clary grinning ear to ear.

  “Come out to dinner with me and I’ll tell you,” Clary said.

  “All right,” Nell said. “I can’t wait.”

  She got the children’s favorite sitter to come and put on some glittery earrings and met Clary at seven at the Blue Parrot. Clary was already seated at a table, drinking—drinking, Nell realized, champagne. A bucket rested in a stand next to the table, and as Nell slid into her seat, Clary began to pour Nell’s glass.

  “What,” Nell said.

  “I’m getting married,” Clary smiled.

  “To whom?” Nell said.

  “Nell!” Clary said. “Who do you think? You think I’d marry just anyone? Jesus, Nell! Bob, of course.”

  “Oh, Clary,” Nell said. “Oh, Clary, wow. Well, I’ll certainly drink to that!” She toasted Clary, sipped her champagne, then said, “Now tell me everything.”

  “It was wonderful,” Clary said. “It was romantic. I had just gotten home from work and was standing in the kitchen talking to my roomies about whether to fix a stew or just do TV dinners, and the doorbell rang, and Mary went to open it and came back and said, ‘Clary, it’s for you.’ So I walked into the living room, and there Bob was. I thought he was out in Michigan! I nearly fell over just to see him. And Nell, oh God, Nell, you know how he loves to wear those T-shirts with messages? Well, he was wearing jeans and a tweed sports coat and sneakers—he looked weird, but good—and a red T-shirt. He took off his sports coat and I saw that the T-shirt said, in white letters, MARRY CHRISTMAS. MARRY ME. I just stood there. I couldn’t think of a thing to say.”

  “I have to admit that’s original,” Nell said. “I’ve heard of being proposed to on a billboard, but never on a T-shirt.”

  “Oh, Nell,” Clary said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “It is,” Nell said. “It really is.”

  Clary was so happy, so high, that she needed to tell Nell every word that was said that evening, every gesture that was made; she relived it in the telling and glowed while she talked. The waiter approached them four times before they finally collected their wits enough to look at a menu and order. By that time they had finished off the bottle of champagne, and Nell, feeling magnanimous—and this was an occasion!—ordered another bottle, her treat.

  Clary was quitting her job, giving up the apartment, moving to Michigan with Bob within the week, as soon as she could get everything done. She’d move into Bob’s apartment with him and they would live like paupers, saving money for furniture and eventually a house. Clary was sure she could find some kind of job at the university.

  “But you know,” Clary said over soup. “Now that it’s finally all settled, Nell, I’m scared. I’m really scared. I didn’t think I would be. I almost wished I weren’t getting married. It’s so scary. It’s so definite. Do you know what? It means I won’t be able to date anymore!”

  “That’s true,” Nell grinned. “That’s definitely one of the things getting married means.”

  “How do I know I’m not making a mistake?” Clary asked.

  Nell smiled. “No one ever knows that for sure, Clary. You’re flying on faith on this one.”

  “Well, you know,” Clary said, growing serious. “That’s kind of hard to do. Flying on faith, I mean. Trusting Bob, I mean. I mean, after the music stopped last night and after all the kissing and so on, after we made love, well, he fell asleep, and I lay there thinking. I thought about our whole relationship, from the time we first met. And I kept stumbling over that horrible time when he betrayed me on his birthday. His thirtieth birthday. When I made him that cake and he went out and slept with teenagers. That was only a year ago, Nell. If he could do that to me then, how can I trust him never to do that to me again?” Suddenly Clary began to cry. “Oh, Nell, I’m so scared. I don’t want him to break my heart. I don’t want him to betray me after we’re married.”

  Nell was quiet. She couldn’t think what the right thing would be to say. “Don’t be scared, Clary,” she began. “He won’t break your heart. He—”

  “Nell!” Clary said. “How can you say that? How can you sit there and say that? God, haven’t you ever had a man betray you? Haven’t you ever once had a man break your heart?”

  Nell looked at Clary, shocked. Clary seemed in dead earnest. Nell could not believe it. She wanted to say flippantly, Well, Clary, there was your father, for starters. But even though she realized that she and Clary were becoming progressively drunk, she knew this was a time for telling truths, and she did not want to lie. Marlow might have hurt her pride, but he didn’t break her heart.

  “Clary,” she began, “my heart’s been broken so many times it looks like a road map.”

  “Really?” Clary said, leaning forward so that her long blond hair nearly dragged in her soup. Her dark eyes, always impressive, were now almost terrifying with their dark demands. “Has your heart really been broken so many times it looks like a road map?”

  Nell leaned back in her chair, as if to ease out of the circle of Clary’s drunken intensity. “Let me think about that a minute,” she said. “You know, it’s broken right now, Clary. Andy isn’t nearly as serious about me as I am about him. I don’t think we’re going to last much longer. I—”

  “But in the past!” Clary interrupted. “Nobody’s broken your heart in the past. You’ve always done the heartbreaking.”

  “Oh no,” Nell said. “Oh no, Clary, that’s not quite true. I just haven’t talked to you much about the times my heart was broken. After I was divorced from Marlow, I met a man
who I thought I was really in love with. I had this sort of belief—anyway, a really dumb, naïve belief, I can see now—that NOW, AT LAST, after Marlow, I’d find true love, the real thing. I had just broken off with Steve, who was a nice lover, but—well, you know all about him. And I had dated Ben and broken off with him. My hopes were beginning to fade.

  “Then at a party I met this man named Quinn. That was his last name; he went by his last name. He was a professor of English. He was handsome, charming, God, was he charming. He said things so beautifully; he knew just how to compliment. He was so clever, so understanding, so flattering. I just fell in love with him like falling down the stairs. He had a problem, though: He drank. I didn’t realize it at the first party we went to. It took me a while to catch on to his alcoholism, because he never slurred his words or got nasty. If anything, he got wittier and more clever. Then, boom, he’d be over the edge, driving without knowing what lane he was in, kissing me while calling me by other women’s names, staggering, blanking out. It worried me, this drinking of his, but I was hooked on him.”