Five Things I Can't Live Without (29 page)

I tried to return her enthusiasm, but couldn’t. I had been antsy all day waiting for this dinner. I didn’t want to talk about anything other than my situation with Dan, because once I got their opinions, I could finally either take some action or forget about it. I’d been out of my head all day, wondering if Dan really did suspect and he’d just been playing it cool; then thinking that if he didn’t suspect, that made it all the worse. In the latter scenario, Dan became a baby deer that didn’t know there was a Hunter nearby.

Oh, God. I was punning. In my distress, I was resorting to the lowest form of humor. Or were limericks lower? I’d never heard a black pun before, but if ever there was one, mine was it.

So here was Sonya, up in the clouds, and then there was Larissa. She just looked, well, perplexingly serene. Looking back and forth between them, I couldn’t hang on another minute.

“I’m freaking out here,” I said. “I didn’t want to just jump into it. I wanted to wait and observe normal social graces, but I can’t.”

Neither Larissa nor Sonya looked particularly surprised. Concerned, yes. Surprised, no.

“It’s real this time. It’s not in my head. I almost cheated on Dan.” As I said that, I realized that the crisis was still in my head, because I hadn’t cheated. And I hadn’t cheated because when Hunter put the ball in my court, I stepped out of my body and back into my head. I was too much of a head case to even cheat properly!

Now Sonya and Larissa were surprised. “That doesn’t sound like you,” Sonya said, with what sounded like reproof.

“Well, the ‘almost’ doing it sounds like her,” Larissa said. “She has a commitment problem.”

Now it was my turn to look surprised. Since when did Larissa make concise diagnoses of her friends, then calmly butter her bread? “What’s happening here?” I demanded, indicating Larissa’s countenance.

She seemed to understand just what I meant. “I made a breakthrough in therapy, and things have been much clearer since.”

Sonya clasped her hands together. “That is so great, Larissa!”

“It is. It is great.” Larissa took a swallow of water.

“What was the breakthrough?” Sonya looked at Larissa eagerly. While I was desperate to get back to my own situation, I did want to know when Larissa had been replaced by a pod.

“I quit therapy.” Larissa could see that we were waiting for more. “That was the breakthrough. I quit. I’ve felt worlds better since. I decided life is not about self-awareness. It’s about being decent and honest and saying, I need what I need and I’m not going to question those needs. So I haven’t been. I need a man. I know how anti-feminist that is. And I don’t care. I am a far happier person with a man than without one, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.” Larissa was getting more and more animated as she went on. “I
love
watching poker tournaments on TV. Why do I act like watching TV is for losers? Why judge myself for that? No one but me ever gave a shit about my TV-viewing habits, but I’d be sitting alone in my apartment beating myself up. It didn’t change the fact that I was watching TV; it just made my experience way less pleasurable. And therapy was definitely making my life less pleasurable, so I quit.” Her eyes danced with ebullient defiance.

Now I was stuck with two of them. “Well, my life’s not pleasurable and I’m not in therapy,” I said.

“Because you’re doing therapy on yourself all the time. The analysis. The assumption that all the struggle should add up to something.” Larissa’s condescension was seriously starting to grate. “It’s like I said, you have a commitment problem. You’re always thinking yourself right out of everything. Like the way you thought yourself out of cheating on Dan.”

“You thought she should cheat on Dan?” Sonya asked.

“I was just using it as an example.”

“You don’t even know the story yet,” I said, offended.

“Tell us the story,” Sonya mollified.

“It’s not much of a story,” I admitted. “I met this client named Hunter last night, and he was really, really sexy. I was literally weak in the knees from the moment I saw him. We were getting along really well, and he suggested we get a drink.”

“What an asshole,” Sonya said.

“What an operator,” Larissa echoed.

I shook my head. “He didn’t know about Dan. I hadn’t told him. I mean, obviously I knew I should say no, but I really wanted to go.” This was the part where I started to squirm. “And I basically did a shot the minute we got to the bar.”

“You were setting it up,” Sonya said. “We’ve all been there.”

I nodded miserably. “I was sitting there hoping he’d kiss me, knowing I shouldn’t be doing this, which made me want to do it more.” They nodded in solidarity. “And he calls me on it! He asks if I have a boyfriend, says he could tell by the way I’ve been acting, and says that I should be the one to kiss him.”

“Again, what an asshole.” Sonya looked disgusted.

“But he didn’t do it like an asshole. He was putting me in the position to decide what I really wanted.”

“And you didn’t really want him,” Sonya said, relieved.

“It’s not that simple. I did really want him. I wanted him from the minute he sat down with me at the cafe. But I couldn’t make the move.”

“Because you love Dan, right?” Sonya prompted.

“I don’t know. I mean, I know I love Dan. I just don’t know what really stopped me. And I don’t know whether I should tell him or not.”

“You should tell him,” Sonya said.

“You shouldn’t tell him,” Larissa disagreed, with equal certainty.

I looked back and forth between them, waiting for them to make their respective cases.

“You should tell him because he has a right to know,” Sonya said. “It’s not a matter of whether you went through with it. You seriously considered being with this other guy, and he should know that.”

“I’ve been thinking that, too,” I said. “I guess he has the right to decide whether he wants to stay with a person like me.”

Larissa shook her head emphatically. “No. Think about it. If you had slept with someone else, that would be new information for Dan. But there’s no new information here. Like I said before, this is just another example of your commitment problem. It’s not some indictment of your character.”

I didn’t know whether Larissa had just insulted me, or defended my honor. “But is it that I can’t commit, or that something is wrong with Dan and me?”

Larissa shook her head again, continuing her reign of condescension. “You’re a serial monogamist, Nora. That’s when it comes to jobs, boyfriends, cities, you name it. Not when it comes to friends, though. There you’re true-blue.” She paused to smile at me before continuing. “But the other stuff—a lot of the time you’re in it, you’re agonizing about whether you should stay. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings. I just think you make your life so much harder than it needs to be.”

“You always have, too!” I said to Larissa passionately. With her sudden shift, I felt bereft. It was like losing a sister.

“It’s not like it’s the worst thing in the world, being a serial monogamist. I mean, look at the divorce rate. It’s an epidemic.” She deflected my comment expertly, like the lawyer she was.

“It’s true,” Sonya said. “Serial monogamy is the new philandering.”

“What does that mean?” I asked her.

“It means that for people who have problems with commitment, it’s easier to be a serial monogamist than to be alone or to keep cheating.”

“So you think it’s my problem with commitment, too?”

“Well,” Sonya hesitated, “there might be some evidence to suggest it.”

Our food arrived, and we started eating silently. Larissa and Sonya seemed tentative. They probably thought they’d been too hard on me. I wasn’t sure if they had or not. I only knew that I didn’t want to talk anymore, and that I was no closer to an ans

wer.

The most prudent course, at least for the time being, was not to tell Dan. Larissa was right. There was no new information in it. Dan knew my ambivalence already. It was my job to figure out what the Hunter situation really meant.

But it wasn’t easy looking Dan in the eye when I got home. I still didn’t feel right touching him, and positioned myself at the opposite end of the couch. We made awkward small talk: I told him about Larissa’s transformation, and about Sonya’s excitement at being sprung from her house. The conversation plodded along, and he listened attentively. I felt awful. I now understood those magazine articles that said people who confessed their affairs weren’t doing a kindness to the other person, they just couldn’t take the guilt.

Soon we’d exhausted our conversational reserves. Maybe sensing that I needed some levity, Dan suddenly went into monkey paroxysms. He whooped and beat his chest. He pretended to juggle. He added a few pratfalls. All he wanted was to make me smile, and the display was depressing the hell out of me.

I didn’t feel like playing Mrs. Pimmbottom just then, but I made a halfhearted attempt. Seeing that my heart wasn’t in it, Dan finally fell back on the couch. He was actually out of breath. It was one of his most acrobatic Rodney performances yet. I wondered if it was wounding to him that after all that, I hadn’t fully played along.

We were all out of talk, Rodney and Mrs. Pimmbottom hadn’t worked, and I realized, with great sadness, that we didn’t know what to do with each other just then. It dawned on me that Rodney and Mrs. Pimmbottom had become our default mode of interaction when we couldn’t be bothered to be us. I remembered when the characters were a sign of how close, safe, and intimate we were. Playing together was a kind of intimacy, but the more we lived out our silliness, the less we were available for adult intimacy. Because while Dan found me funny as Mrs. Pimmbottom, he surely didn’t want to fuck Mrs. Pimmbottom. See, it wasn’t just me that was getting lost in this relationship; it was us.

Suddenly it seemed imperative to tell Dan what had almost happened between Hunter and me, to get him to finally see that we weren’t just coasting, we were stalling.

“Dan, I have something to tell you.” He looked at me expectantly. “Last night I went out for a drink with my client and I almost kissed him. I didn’t, but I wanted to.”

I waited nervously for his reaction. His face belied nothing. Five minutes passed. Even for Dan, that was a long time.

“Do you have any questions for me?” I finally said, when I couldn’t bear the silence a second longer.

“Is that how this is supposed to go?” I’d never seen Dan’s face so cold. “You tell me you almost cheated, and I pump you for the details?”

“I don’t know how this is supposed to go. I haven’t been in this situation before.”

He stood up. “I’m going to spend the night at Fara’s.”

“Don’t you think we should talk about this?” I asked helplessly.

“No. I don’t.”

“Why Fara’s?” Bart had moved out of Fara’s apartment, and I knew she’d always had a thing for Dan. I could picture her settling him in the guest room (my old room!) and then finding her way in there in the middle of the night. The image made me feel sick. Was that his point?

“Because she’s my friend, and she has an extra room.”

No, that hadn’t been his point. Because no matter what Fara did, Dan would stay faithful. Dan knew how to make a commitment, the bastard. I loved and hated him profoundly in that moment.

“I’ll be back on Monday to pick you up for salsa class.” Had he actually just said that? I stared up at him in shock. Then I realized: We’d made a commitment to Roxy. Now he was making his point.

“Can I call you?”

He sighed. I saw what an effort it had taken him to be so contained for the past few minutes. “No. You can’t.”

He left the room and I could hear him pulling luggage from the top of the closet. I collapsed against the couch, terrified and numb.

Chapter 19

D
an didn’t say another word to me. He wouldn’t even look at me.

Once he was gone (
once he was gone, oh, God
), I wandered through the apartment, dazed. He had to come back, right? I mean, this was his apartment. That was his bar. He might leave me, but he couldn’t leave the bar for good.