by Melissa Ford
I lied to her the night of her bachelorette party. I didn’t feel like talking about it, and it was easier to tell her that I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks than to tell her that I cut it off hours earlier. What’s the difference? Either way, he’s not in my life.
But it’s as if Rachel has coated herself with oil and my vinegar lies roll off her. The conversation can’t emulsify after that, and we go around in circles, Rachel accusing me of being jealous of her marriage and me reasoning that I have no desire to get married. She waits until I have tired myself out, going around in circles, to lob her final bomb. It explodes into shards of silence: “So you’ve told my brother about how you kissed Noah the other day? In Union Square? Outside? You argued with him, and then you kissed him. Do you want to tell Ethan or should I?”
I’m stunned, as if the walls of my apartment have just collapsed on me, and I can’t breathe; it’s like sucking air in through a straw. The shower turns off, and I can hear Ethan climbing out of the shower, humming to himself. Did she hear our whole conversation that day? I choke out, “I think I’ll have Tabitha at the loft do the final fitting. You can stop by there tomorrow at two because I’ll be out by that point. No need to come by today.”
My heart is pounding furiously as she snaps her phone shut, ending our call. In two minutes, Ethan is going to emerge from that bathroom, and I am going to need to make a choice; do I tell him that I once weighed him against Noah, that being with Noah made me wonder if Ethan and I can ever work? Do I admit my feelings or tuck them away and hope that Rachel never tells him about the kiss in the park?
I throw on a pair of black, swingy pants and a black sweater, slipping on my favorite black ballet flats. I sit down on the floor, stacking Beckett’s blocks, higher and higher until they fall by their own volition. Beckett dances excitedly in the mess, kicking the blocks with his happy feet. I wish it could be as simple as this: block structures and eggs for breakfast and slow-moving mornings. But it isn’t easy. It hasn’t been simple since Ethan moved in.
We’ve both been asking each other to be something we’re not.
The door to the bathroom opens, and Ethan comes out, a towel around his waist. “Just give me a second to get dressed,” he calls out as he passes through the room. When he returns, he drops his backpack on a chair and grabs an apple from the refrigerator, ignoring the plates and cookware soaking in the sink. “You’re wearing that to the zoo?”
“No, I’m wearing this to work,” I tell him.
“I thought we were going out. I thought we were grabbing a Zipcar and going someplace we’ve never been.”
“You said that,” I agree. “But I need to get to the loft. After we talk.”
Beckett runs his mouth over my arm, teething against me and leaving behind a long string of drool. I hand him a binky, and he pops it into his mouth, noisily sucking as he gets back down to business, stepping on each of his blocks. I fold myself back down over my knees, my face hidden by my hair. It’s so much easier to say it if I don’t have to see his face.
“I didn’t tell you the whole story with Noah,” I begin.
“I know.”
I look up once I process what he’s said, and he shrugs. “I could tell that you had a crush on him. Or on his connections. Or . . . I don’t know . . . on his life.”
I’m stunned, and I blink a few times as if wondering whether I’m lucidly dreaming. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“What was there to say? Hey, sweetie, I can tell that you’ve developed feelings for this stranger? I figured, what was the harm in a crush if you didn’t act on it. Listen, I’m well aware that other people would be pissed and freak out about something like this. And believe me, at first, I was pissed. But I trust you. I trust you completely, and that extends to your relationships with other people. I knew you wouldn’t act on those feelings.”
“How did you know that I wasn’t acting on those feelings?”
“Things got better with us after you struck up that friendship. You calmed down a lot, and that’s saying something considering how stressed out you were with Fashion Week. I figured that if things changed with that relationship, that things would change with us, too.” He sinks down onto the floor and starts to gather up Beckett’s blocks, making a tiny square fortress that Beckett gleefully kicks over. “What did you get out of being with him that . . . you know . . . you didn’t get out of being with me?”
“He supports my creativity. He doesn’t make me feel guilty for wanting to be more than Davis & Howe’s finisher. He understands my ambition.”
“I understand your ambition,” Ethan insists.
“You acknowledge that I have ambition, but you don’t support that I’m trying to build something. Something here, in Manhattan, that will take up my time and energy and keep me in this city.”
Ethan stares at me for a long time without saying anything. I don’t want to hurt him, but the only way through this is to tell him everything. I owe him that. “Ethan, I’m not going to Nepal. I’m not going around the world. I’m not quitting my job. And I want to be with someone who wants to set down firm roots. And maybe you’re not someone who can set down roots.”
“What are you talking about?” Ethan says. “I have roots. I’m close with my family; I still live near where I grew up.”
“But you like wandering. You like taking wrong turns and seeing where they lead.”
Once I say it aloud, it sounds ridiculous even though it sounded important in my head. But isn’t that why we can’t see eye-to-eye—because he likes to wander and I like to stay? I like to build and he likes to explore?
“You like taking wrong turns,” Ethan says, brushing a hair out of my eye and then sliding over a stack of blocks toward Beckett, who squeals, almost losing the binky that’s dangling from his lips. “I remember a certain day, right after we got together, when we left Beckett with the babysitter and we took the Zipcar out of the city toward New Jersey. And we took all those wrong turns and stopped in at that random town.”
“With the vintage clothing store,” I continue, “and I got that 1920s drop-waist dress with the matching belt.”
“Exactly,” Ethan says, the corners of his eyes crinkling over his happiness that I remember the day. “See, you do like wrong turns.”
“I like wrong turns at the right time,” I tell him. “But there haven’t been a lot of right times lately.”
“Ari, I know you say that you’re not into marriage. I get that. But maybe marriage means something different to me than it does to you. Maybe I’m looking for something to tether me, to hold me somewhere so I can’t wander off.”
“But that makes it sound like I’m going to hold you here, against your will. Or that this is a love dungeon and you’re my prisoner.”
“Love dungeon sounds interesting,” Ethan says, raising his eyebrows.
“I’m serious. Ethan, I don’t want you to resent me. I don’t want to be your ball and chain. You need to stay with things because you want to stay with things, not because someone is making you.”
“Ari, you’re the first and only person I want to be with when things go to crap or when things fall harmoniously into place. That has to mean something.”
“Of course it means something,” I tell him. “But is that enough?”
We stare at each other for a long time, Beckett sliding between us to push his blocks around as if they’re cars. “Fine, so let’s not get married,” Ethan finally says. “I don’t want to get married.”
“You can’t just say that,” I tell him. “You do want to get married. That’s the point. Maybe we’re too different. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and discover that you swallowed down all of your desires in order to make me happy. Doing that doesn’t breed love. It just breeds bitterness. The point is that we’re not matched for each other, at least, not in some big ways.”
“We’re not that different. At least not in the ways that really matter. I wish you could see that.”
“Noah kissed me,” I finally say. “He kissed me, but I didn’t kiss him back. Rachel saw it, and when I spoke to her while you were in the shower, she told me that she was going to tell you. I wanted you to hear it from me. He kissed me, and I didn’t stop him and I didn’t hit him and I didn’t walk away. I just didn’t kiss him back. But I really liked him, Ethan. I think, I could have loved him if we weren’t . . . He just got me. In a really big way, he got me.”
Ethan stares at me. Of all the things he guessed, the kiss was not one of them. His mouth opens and closes twice, and then he looks away from me and stares at Beckett.
“I think I need to go on a walk,” I tell him, standing up. “I need to figure things out. I can take Beckett to Martina, and then go on a walk. And I have to get to the loft. I’m late.”
I scurry around the apartment, grabbing my things so quickly that I end up leaving my wallet behind and need to slink back into the apartment to grab it. He doesn’t say anything when the door opens again, or when I cross the room, trying not to meet his gaze. I take a chance to look at him, but he’s staring at his hands, soundlessly. His lack of words feels like how news of the kiss must have felt inside his ears, making them itch in unscratchable spots. Making his throat ache from everything he’s holding back.
ETHAN FINDS A million things he needs to do that week, all of them outside the apartment. He departs before Beckett and I wake up in the morning, sometimes politely leaving a note for us on the table, and comes home long after we’ve gone to bed. He tells me that he can sleep in the living room. I’m not sure what that accomplishes except that I feel even farther away from him knowing that he’s on the other side of the wall.
When I lie in the dark, it’s a bit like before Ethan moved in, except that I now have an Ethan-sized hole in my heart. I got used to Ethan in my bed, and seeing him in the kitchen or on the sofa watching television, underfoot in a thousand different ways. Now, it’s as if Beckett and I live with a ghost who sometimes leaves a coffee mug in the sink when he’s running late for work or who places a folded blanket on the edge of the sofa when he’s not sleeping; small whispers that tell me someone has been around even if I didn’t see him, and that just makes me more lonely.
I want to ask him to sleep in our bed, except I know that isn’t fair if I’m still missing Noah.
I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, hoping it will be like visiting the store, going somewhere pretty with bright lights and orderly glass cases, but it’s all wrong. Holly Golightly depresses me, her lostness floats from the paper like perfume, and I alternately want to cry for her because her blind hope breaks my heart and throttle her for her selfishness. I squirm with discomfort over my own selfishness, thinking about all the times I’ve emulated Holly in her little black dress and pearls.
And yet I also don’t want to be like “Fred,” needing Holly more than he even needs himself. Unlike the dashing Paul Varjak in the movie, the book’s narrator is a nameless writer, a gay man infatuated with Holly. Even if it isn’t a romantic love, it’s an adoration that blots out everything and everyone else, that makes him unable to let her go even after she leaves. It is scary to depend on one person to be your everything.
By the time I get to the scene where Holly releases the cat, which is much less Hollywood and much more pathetic on the page, I’m sick with worry that I’ve turned Ethan into my poor slob of a cat, someone to keep nameless and at arm’s length. He wants to be my husband, and I’ve kept him my boyfriend—an impermanent title in his eyes—because I think that will always give me an out, the ability to toss him to the side of the street. I don’t want to be like Holly, running through the rain to try to find him again.
I am going to end up a grey-haired cat lady, all alone.
But there’s no time to talk to him about this because on the weekend, he takes a job with Gael’s brother-in-law, photographing two separate weddings back-to-back. I sit at the kitchen counter, burying myself in the Sunday Styles while Beckett teethes his way through a bagel.
The Times has an announcement about the 500th married couple that met at Volt. I spend ten minutes staring at the couple, a slightly bewildered set of thirtysomethings named Lori and Roger, who are staring at the camera in disbelief; disbelief that they’ve found one another or disbelief that they’ve been chosen out of the thousands of couples walking around New York City. Lori is originally from Colorado, and they held their wedding at the Flagstaff Amphitheater. Roger works as a foreign policy analyst. They met over a chance desire for coffee on a rainy day, sharing a table in the crowded store.
I stare at their pixelated faces, newsprint smudged in shades of grey, and I want to call Rachel, ask if she’s seen the announcement, but I am too scared to talk to her. I keep checking her blog, waiting for her to say something, anything. But she’s strangely silent there, too, her accusation even harder to look at now that it’s actually been spoken to Ethan.
I pack. I ask Tabitha to handle the final fitting for Rachel’s wedding dress while I run around the city taking care of last-minute errands so I can avoid seeing Rachel. I ask her to get the dress pressed and back to Rachel in time if I’m still away. I neaten the refrigerator, throwing out expired milk and old leftovers. I call Martina and tell her that we’ll be away for the week.
And then there’s nothing left to do except call a car service to take us to the airport. It is strange not to say good-bye to Rachel, considering that she’s only a short walk away. But there’s a greater distance between us than the blocks between our two apartments.
But stranger still is the kiss Ethan doles out on each of our cheeks before he leaves for work. Safe travels, he tells us, his eyes on Beckett instead of me. Let me know when you get there. Give my love to your mother. And then he’s gone too, his empty coffee cup the only proof that he was there that morning. It feels as if I’ve been blown apart, like a dandelion. Drifting.
Chapter Sixteen
THE HOSPITAL waiting room smells inexplicably like rubbing alcohol and bacterial hand soap, as if those of us sitting there, watching the minute hand drag slowly across the clock face, have also been outfitted with IVs in solidarity. I keep checking my phone, expecting a message of support from Ethan, something to get me through these next few hours as we wait for the doctor to come out. I don’t really deserve it, but I hope for it anyway. But the only unread texts are the old ones from Noah.
“I think we’ll bring in dinner tonight,” my father says.
“That’s fine,” I answer, automatically.
“What do you think you want?”
“Right now?”
“What do you want to eat tonight? We could bring in food from Blue Point if that’s what you’re in the mood for. I guess there wouldn’t be a lot for Beckett there.”
His voice trails off as he looks at the clock. “We don’t have to decide right now,” I point out. “I can run out later and pick something up.”
“Your mother made a bunch of meals and left them in the freezer, but I’m not exactly sure how to defrost one. Do you leave it on the counter for a few hours?”
“I’ll write out directions when we get home. But it’s probably better to defrost things in the refrigerator.”
“I don’t know how to defrost those meals in the freezer. So I think we’ll bring in food tonight.”
I stand up, even though I have nowhere to go, and walk a tight, small circle in front of the chairs, repeating steps like my father repeats words. “I’m going to take a little walk, Dad. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“I don’t think you’re going to miss anything,” my father comments, his eyes still on the clock. “It’s still going to be a while until they come out and tell us anything. Maybe you should check in on Beckett, make sure everything is okay at home
. Think about where you want to eat tonight.”
I assure him that I’m going to do just that and walk down the hallway toward the front lobby of the hospital, where the cell phone reception is better. Before I turn the corner, I glance back at him. He’s still watching the clock, his hands resting over his knees as if he’s holding his body together. Maybe he is holding his body together, tensing it into a tiny block of muscles and bones and hope so he doesn’t shatter while he waits for the doctor to bring him news of his wife. He looks bewildered, as if he can’t quite fathom how he has ended up in this hospital waiting room.
I look at my phone one more time when I get to the lobby, my wishful thinking dashed. I thought maybe it was just reception in the waiting area not sending my messages through. With the time difference, Ethan should be in his planning period right now. I take a deep breath and tap out a note to Ethan before I second-guess myself.
My mother is still in surgery.
I stand as still as a statue, staring at my phone, while the people around me move in pairs and trios across the lobby, entering and exiting. Finally, my phone gives a shudder, as if releasing a sigh.
Let me know when you hear something.
We used to text before we moved in together.
We’re texting now.
We used to flirt. Before you moved in, you sent me messages throughout the day.
I guess we don’t need to text now because I see you daily.
I still need the messages.
My phone is still for a long time again, and then it sends back two words: I’m sorry.
Is he apologizing for not sending me text messages anymore? Is he sorry I’m so needy? I type back two words as well: me, too. I hug the phone to my chest and wander into the gift shop off the lobby to kill time to see if he writes back, pausing by the display of flower bouquets before I walk back to the surgical waiting area.
