Besides, the last thing I want to appear is ungrateful. I am grateful. I loved our trip as much as you can possibly love a trip when you don’t love the person you’re with. When we pull up to Jess’s apartment, I kiss Richard and thank him one final time.
He says, “I’m going to miss you tonight.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” I say.
It is the first lie I’ve ever told him.
I only miss one person right about now, and his name isn’t Richard.
“Well?” Jess says when I open the door. She is wearing an oversized man’s undershirt and a pair of Daisy Dukes from our college days. The hem is unraveling in long strands. “How was it?”
“It was incredible,” I say. “The place is breathtaking and you packed perfectly. The lacy underwear came in handy”
“But?” she says. A best friend can always sense a but coming.
“But I don’t think I want to keep seeing Richard.”
Jess’s eyes widen and she says, “Why not? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t know. It was all great and fine, and then he gave me this.” I hold up my ring.
She grabs my hand, identifying the gems as a pink tourmaline flanked by two peridots. Then she admits to giving Richard my ring size, but insists that he picked it out himself. She had no input. Then she says, “Wait. I don’t get it. Do you not like it or what?”
“I like it,” I say.
“So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know The relationship, just makes me feel unmoored .”
” Unmoored ? What the hell does that mean? You read too many books.”
I didn’t expect Jess to understand, but I try to make her anyway. I say that Richard just feels like killing time, and killing time doesn’t feel good when you’re thirty-five.
“Shit,” she says, wincing. “I forgot today was the actual day. I have your card somewhere and another small gift Happy birthday. How’s it feel?”
“Not so great,” I say.
“Why not?” she says.
“I feel old.”
“So what? You don’t want kids.”
I think of the last time she told me that my age was irrelevant simply because I didn’t want children. This time I say something. “I know I don’t want kids But that doesn’t mean I don’t want anything .”
Jess looks hurt when she says, “You have me.”
“I know I do, Jess,” I say. “And I love you to death But you know friends aren’t the same thing.”
She doesn’t try to dispute this. Instead she says, “Well, you have Richard, too.”
“Richard’s not enough, either,” I say. “I want more. I want what I had with Ben.”
Jess inhales as though she is about to impart some wisdom I am pretty sure she does not possess. Then she stops and just says, “Don’t we all, my friend? Don’t we all?”
Later that night, my cell phone rings and awakens me from a fairly sound sleep. I answer with a disoriented hello.
“I expected voice mail.”
It is a man’s voice and at first I think it is Richard, and then register that it is Ben.
I sit up and snap to attention. No part of me expected a call from Ben, on my birthday or otherwise. I say his name, which feels intimate because I am in bed, in the dark. I look at the clock. It is only nine.
He says, “Happy thirty-five.”
“Thank you,” I say. My heart is racing, and I am smiling. No, I am full-on grinning. Ben has just made me happier than any ring, or any other person, could ever make me.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“It was fine,” I say. And then bravely add, “Better now.”
“So,” he says. “What did you do?”
I hesitate and then say, “Not too much.”
I feel guilty for lying to him (Lake Como could never be construed as “not too much”). And I feel guilty because I went to Lake Como without him. I tell myself that I don’t owe him the truth, and I am allowed to go anywhere with anyone I choose. But I still feel guilty.
“Annie says your boyfriend took you somewhere?” Ben says, and I can suddenly tell that he’s been drinking. The boldness of the question gives something away, but beyond that, his speech is slightly slurred, all the words running together. And just as I am very good at guessing what time it is in the morning by the light coming through the window, I can pretty much guess that Ben’s had five beers, six tops. What I can’t tell, however, is whether he drank them alone or with Tucker.
“Oh, she did, did she?” I say, wondering whether Annie thought she was helping me outor whether she was sabotaging me, when she passed this information along. Then I consider saying that Richard is not my boyfriend, but I’m not so sure I want Ben to have this information. It depends on whether he’s with someone, which of course, I don’t know. Apparently Annie’s gossip only flows in one direction. Regardless of her intent, I feel on the verge of writing her off.
“So where’d you go with ol’ Richard?” Ben says. “And I do mean old .”
“Are you drunk?” I deflect. I do not want to tell him where I was.
“Maybe,” he says. “I had to celebrate my ex-wife’s birthday, after all.”
“With Tucker?” I say, proving that, unlike Ben, I don’t need five or six beers to ask immature, incendiary questions.
Ben says, “That depends on where you went with Richard?”
“Well, you either were with her on my birthday, or you weren’t,” I say.
“I was, in fact,” he says.
“Fantastic,” I say, marveling at how one person can take me from happy to agitated in seconds. In fact, I am suddenly angry enough to consider revising my stance on Richard. Maybe I’ll have sex with him a few more times. In any event, I am going to wear my ring tomorrow to work.
Ben says nothing, so I say, “How did you and your girl celebrate my big day?”
“That’s for me and Tucker to know,” Ben says. “Just like, apparently, it’s for you and old Richard to know the secret spot of your special celebration.”
The “me and Tucker” is a knife in my chest. The pain is so sharp, in fact, that I blurt out, “Richard took me to Lake Como. The Villa d’Este to be exact. It was magnificent.”
I hear a click and realize my drunk ex-husband just hung up on me, beating me to it by seconds.
The next morning I roll into work, turn on my computer, and promptly Google Tucker Janssen, complete with two ss . She is all I’ve thought about since about four a.m., first in the form of a disturbingly graphic dream, and then in my wide-awake, paranoid, and thoroughly pissed-off state. I am dismayed when I get six hits, but not nearly as upset as I am when I click on the first listing and pull up her grinning mug and an article in her hometown (Naperville, IllinoisI knew she was Midwestern) newspaper. The caption reads: HOMETOWN GIRL TURNED HARVARD MED STUDENT SAVES DYING MAN. The article is four years oldwhich means she’s no longer a medical student. She’s a full-fledged, practicing doctor. I scan the article and read her quote: “I’ve actually known CPR since junior high, so I didn’t really apply any new skills. But the incident did lead to my decision to practice emergency medicine.”
My heart drops as I grab the phone and hit my speed-dial button for Jess at work.
She answers on speaker phone with a jovial hello.
“Take me off speaker,” I say with the urgency I feel.
I hear a rustle of her picking up the phone and then, “What’s going on?”
“She’s a doctor , Jess.”
“What?” Jess says.
“I re-Googled her. She’s an ER doctor.”
“Tucker?” Jess says.
“Yes,” I say, blinking back tears.
I hear Jess clicking away on her keyboard. Then she says, “Where are you seeing this?”
“Put two s s in Janssen,” I say. “Like your sperm donor, Ian.”
I hear more clicking and then, “Ohhh. Yeah. Here it is Yeah, this is pretty unfortunate”
I wait for something more, some pep talk about how being an editor is just as noble as practicing emergency medicine. She might be saving lives, but I’m enriching healthy lives.
Jess comes up with something else. Something better. “This doesn’t prove jack. It doesn’t prove they’re dating. And it certainly doesn’t prove that she’s any good in bed.”
“I need to know, Jess,” I say, thinking of my conversation with Ben last night. “I need to know what’s going on there.”
“Okay,” Jess says. “Did you try Googling their names together? In a joint search? It always pulls up married or engaged couples.”
“Jesus! You think they could be engaged ?”
“No. Calm down. I’m just saying hold on gimme a sec here to run this thing” There is more clicking, then silence. Then I hear Jess whisper, “Well, fuck me.”
“What?” I say. “What did you get?”
“I got a hit,” she says.
“With Benjamin or Ben?” I say.
“Ben,” she says. “You’re not going to like it.”
My hands shake as I type Ben Davenport in quotes next to Tucker Janssen, two ss . Sure enough, I get a hit, too. The Chicago marathon results. Their time is the same: 3:42:55. Impressive, especially for a woman. So she’s a doctor and an athlete. But by far the worst part about this discovery is that their time is the same. Which means that they held hands across the finish line, something Ben always told me we would do together. So now I have a complete picture: I know they trained together, flew to Chicago together, visited her family in her apple-pie hometown together, gutted out a marathon together, and finished together, hand in hand. This is vastly more significant than the Villa d’Este. Jess knows it too, which I gauge by her uncharacteristic silence. It takes an awful lot to defeat Jess, especially when it comes to my honor. But she is defeated now.
“And to think,” I say. “This is just what we can pull up on Google.”
“Yeah,” Jess says sadly. “We’d better not run another search with the word baby , huh?”
twenty-three
That afternoon, my father comes into the city to have lunch with me at the Mayrose Diner. He offered to take me somewhere nicer, but on the heels of the Villa d’Este, I’m in more of a laminated-menu mood than a cloth-napkin mood. We sit in our booth and make small talk about Italy. I tell him he needs to add Lake Como to his list of things to see before he dies.
“I don’t have such a list,” he says, transferring his onion, lettuce, and tomato from the side of his plate to his burger.
“You need to have one,” I say.
He gives me a look as if he’s considering this. That’s when I tell him about my Google search. His face twists up in sympathy. “I’m sorry, kiddo,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “A bummer, isn’t it?”
“I guess it’s time to really let Ben go,” he says. “You don’t want to become as bitter as your old man.”
I reach out and pat his hand. “Dad, you aren’t bitter,” I say. But as soon as the words are out, I realize that his happy routine could be just that. Maybe he still misses my mother. It strikes me that she is the sort of person who, if you are unfortunate enough to fall for, you might never be able to stop loving.
He nods and says, “In some ways I am But it’s too late for me to change. You, on the other hand, have your whole life ahead of you So what about this fellow Richard? Sounds pretty serious if he’s taking you to Italy?”
I shake my head. It feels a bit funny to admit to my father that I went to Italy with a man I’m not serious about, but I still say, “I don’t think that’s going to work out actually.”
“Why’s that? Does he want kids, too?”
I’m not sure whether this is a joke or not, but I laugh and then dab at my lips with my napkin. “No. He doesn’t, actually. In that sense, he’s perfect for me.”
My dad tries again. “So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t love him,” I say. “I’m never going to care about him in that way I would have thought that was okay. But I end up feeling a little bit empty around him.”
My dad puts down his burger and says, “Don’t you wish we could pick the people we love?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Or just make the people we love want the same things we want.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That would be pretty good, too.”
Jess calls me back that afternoon and says, “Let’s go out tonight.” “I can’t,” I say. “I have to go to the gym and run a couple of nine-minute miles, thank you very much.”
“You’re not going to the gym tonight.”
“I’ve heard exercise makes you feel better,” I say, thinking that I’ve never really found that to be the case. More often, I find it to be frustrating when several consecutive workouts yield no visible results.
Jess says, “You need a few drinks.”
I am tempted, but a few drinks with Jess almost never means a few drinks. Especially when one of us is dealing with any sort of upsetting professional, personal, or familial episode. It usually means a few drinks and then a long dinner and then a few more drinks. And then, if the tragedy is great enough, there is dancing at the cheesiest bridge-and-tunnel club Jess can dig up for us. It actually can be very therapeutic so I’m tempted to cave, but I consider the hangover that I will have tomorrow and make the thirty-five-year-old determination that it’s not worth it.
I say, “I wish I could But I’m too far behind in my reading. I accomplished almost nothing in Italy.”
“Oh, c’mon. You’re always behind in your reading,” Jess says.
“Yes, but I’m perilously behind now,” I say.
She says, “Tough. We’re going out. Meet me at Temple Bar at seven sharp.”
Then she hangs up before I can respond.
Temple Bar was one of the first bars Jess and I ever went to upon our move to New York. We got the recommendation from one of Jess’s family friends, a girl named Caroline who had been living in the city for several years by the time we arrived. She gave Jess a list entitled “Cool Places to Be Seen in Manhattan,” which we consulted before going out at night, putting asterisks next to our favorite spots. Temple Bar earned two asterisks. Even though the drinks were out of our usual happy-hour price range and we had to take an expensive cab ride to get to NoHo, it was always worth it. We felt cool when we were therelike we were making it in Manhattan.
One day, Jess’s new boyfriend, a funny lawyer named Stu, came across the list in our kitchen. He and Jess had one of those relationships marked by merciless teasing; it was almost as if neither had evolved past the playground, hair-pulling stage. In any event, he took great pleasure in the find.