Peg. Steven. Julia. Steven.
I put the phone on vibrate and set it on the bedside table, then pulled pillows over me until only my nose and mouth were exposed. I fell asleep again and woke to the phone buzzing across the surface of the table. I looked at the number: Dan. I answered.
“Grace, are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m okay.”
“Steven called me, he’s very worried about you.”
“Would you do me a favor? Would you call him and tell him you spoke with me and I’m all right, and I’ll be in touch soon?”
Silence. I could feel him evaluating my vibe. “Why don’t you come here? You’ll have your room. We don’t have to talk.”
I would not cry with Dan, as much as I wanted to. As much as I needed to. “Thank you, I’m fine where I am at the moment.”
“Listen: Whatever is going on right now, it’s temporary. It’s not what the rest of your life is about. You’ll get through it, and be stronger than ever.”
“Okay. Yes. Thank you.” Damn! Crying. “Gotta go,” I squeaked, and hung up.
I was crying, yes—who knew when that would ever stop? But I actually felt a little better. My dad was right, I could get through this. I knew I could. I just had to figure out the next step.
I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night. At around three a.m. I took a long, hot bath. And found I really like the clove-scented soap they give you at the Waldorf. Then I started writing out a rough-draft plan for my life in small steps that would get me through the next few days. I could regroup and plan farther into the future over the weekend.
At nine a.m. Monday:
STEP ONE: Call in sick.
STEP TWO: Text Julia, reassuringly.
STEP THREE: Call Peg.
“Hey,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the Waldorf.”
“What’s going on?”
“Can I live with you?”
Long moment of absorption.
“Okay. I’ll have to kick out the guy who’s been renting the room. How soon do you need to move in?”
“Today.”
“You’ll have to sleep on an air mattress till the guy finds a new place to live. Or maybe you just need a few nights?”
“No. I need forever.”
More absorption. “You probably don’t want to go into it all on the phone.”
“Can we talk when I get there? Later this morning?”
“I’ll be here.”
STEP FOUR: Go home and a) get my things and b) leave a goodbye note for Steven, who would be at work.
Yes, a note. Yes, I was being cowardly. I knew that I had to deal with him face-to-face. But that could be soon. It couldn’t be now.
Everything was quiet when I let myself in.
Then Steven came out of the bedroom. I was so startled that my teeth crunched into my tongue.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Great. More watery eyes, this time from my throbbing, bleeding, swelling tongue.
“Where have you been?” he asked politely. He was in jeans and a sweatshirt. Not dressed for work.
“I, uh—at a hotel.”
“Why?”
“Just, um—”
He looked at my hand. “Where’s your ring?”
Oh, man. The ring. I knelt and unzipped my overnight bag and fumbled around till I found the sock. I dug down to the toe. He watched me extract the ring with an expression of bemused disbelief.
“Grace, what is going on?”
“Steven, I am so sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.” I held the ring out to him on the palm of my hand. He stared at it.
“What are you doing?”
“We can’t get married. I can’t. Get married.”
“Have I done something?”
“No, it’s me. I—”
“Is it Tyler?”
I nodded.
His face turned white, then red. He leaned against the wall and moaned. “Goddammit. God
dammit
! I’ve been an idiot. Such a fucking idiot.”
“Please, no—”
“Was he with you at the hotel?”
“No!”
“You lied to me about being friends with him.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t mean to lie.”
“I
hate
you for this.”
I had never seen him like this. He was Even Steven.
“Yes, I—I understand. . . .” I gently set the ring on the table by the door. “I—I’m just going to get a few things, and I’ll go.”
He followed me to the bedroom and watched me get my suitcase out of the closet and set it on the bed. It was hard to unzip with shaking hands. I pulled the dresser drawers open one by one and tossed things into the suitcase.
“Is it because I’ve been gone so much?”
“No. It’s me. My problem.”
“How long have you been sleeping with him?”
“I haven’t.”
“You haven’t slept with him?”
“No.”
“So . . . we can work through this. People get crushes, it’s not a big deal. Stop. Stop packing.”
I went to the closet and hefted a chunk of my clothes, hangers and all, into the suitcase. Threw in some shoes and belts.
“I thought you were smarter than this, Grace. Do you think he’s going to actually love you? Just you? Women offer themselves to him and he takes them up on it. A girl I work with fucked him. I heard her telling her friend about it in the lunchroom. A meaningless, drunken fuck after one of his ‘gigs.’ He uses women and discards them. Are you going to waste yourself like that? It’s disgusting, if you think about it. The possibility of disease.”
I sat on the edge of the bed.
“Are you listening to me?”
I nodded.
He sat beside me. “Maybe you need more time to think about it.”
“No.”
He pulled me to him and put his head on my shoulder. He held me too tightly, leaned too heavily. Then he cried. I actually felt afraid; he had me in such a grip that I couldn’t move. I made myself breathe and stay calm. Bear his weight.
After a while he sat up. Not looking at me. He wiped his face on his sleeve.
I stood up and tried to close the suitcase. God knows what I had crammed in it. Steven helped me zip it shut. He carried it to the living room and I followed, snagging my laptop bag along the way.
I started to open the front door but he stepped in front of it. “Did you love me?”
“I . . . Steven, I respect you. So much. And . . . I do love you . . . as a friend and good person and . . . oh, Steven . . . I’m sorry.”
He was looking at my mouth. “I didn’t know I had kissed you for the last time. I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t, either.”
“One more time,” he said, closing in.
It was the best kiss we’d ever shared. I would have liked to have told him so.
STEP FIVE: Move in with Peg.
Peg came from one of those old New York families that used to have money. She was somehow distantly related to J. P. Morgan. She had bought her apartment in the West Village when she was right out of college in the mid-eighties, with down-payment money she’d inherited. It was a large, two-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up. The bathroom alone was larger than many studio apartments, with an old iron skylight over the bathtub. To open it, you turned a crank thing with a long, hooked pole.
The comfort of being able to come back at a time like this was immeasurable.
She buzzed me in.
“Is the guy here?” I whispered.
“No, he’s hardly ever here. He’s in school at NYU and he has a job. Do you want some tea?”
“Yes, please.”
“Have you eaten anything this morning?”
“Not yet.”
She made me two slices of buttered toast and milky tea. She sat across from me at the table and watched me peel the crusts off with trembling fingers. “Want me to cut those off?”
“No, I’ve got it.” I took a tiny bite of the toast and chewed. Washed it down my dry throat with a swig of lukewarm tea.
She waited patiently the full five minutes it took for me to eat the first piece of toast before she asked, “What happened? Did you sleep with Ty?”
I set my mug down. “Why would you ask me that? Have I ever behaved inappropriately with him?”
“Not that I know of.”
“We almost did it on the ground in the woods.”
“Almost?”
“It was close, but I stopped it.”
“That must have been Herculean, for both of you. You guys have been heading there for a long time.”
“I wasn’t heading there!”
“Well, Ty certainly was.”
“No, he wasn’t! He didn’t try anything during the whole trip.
What happened—I started it.” “What were you doing out in the woods?”
“He took me there. To show me a waterfall. And I was looking at the water, and looking at him, and it was like something in my brain
moved.
And I realized that I love him.” I pictured his face at my moment of clarity and the tenderness washed through me again. “I
love
him.” My voice was starting to shake.
She moved over to the chair beside me and rubbed my arm gently. “That’s okay, Grace. It’s good.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not.”
“Why?”
“I got so scared! Terrified. And my heart was beating hard, and strangely, and I couldn’t breathe, and my face and fingers were tingling.”
“Sounds like a panic attack.”
“It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had. He helped me, stayed with me till I calmed down, and when we were going back to the house I just—I
leapt
on him. And then we were on the ground, and I was half-naked, and about one minute away from total disaster I stopped it.”
She handed me a paper napkin and I blew my nose. “Well, you did the right thing.”
“I know.”
She nodded. “It wouldn’t have been clean for you. Honorable.”
“I know.”
“What about Steven?”
“It’s over. I went to get my clothes and I was going to leave him a note because I am such a coward, but he was there and I told him. He was so angry and hurt. It was awful.”
She set a warm hand on my shoulder. “We’ll put the air mattress in my room, and you can sleep there until the guy finds another place and you can move into your old room.”
I couldn’t believe there was any water left in my body at this point, but still more ran down my face. “Peg, I love you.”
She patted my hand. “You just need to chill out and settle down and take things very slowly for a while now.”
I nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“And probably with Ty, too.”
I grabbed another napkin.“I won’t be seeing him again.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, that’s not something that’s actually going to happen, me being with him in any way!”
“You’re confusing me. You just told me that you love him.”
“Well, who doesn’t?”
“But he loves you. He told you so.”
I stared at her.
“The night after Joe’s Pub?” she clarified.
“He was drunk!”
“But it was true.”
Why was she trying to make this difficult? “Even if it were, it just wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
God. Where to begin. I grabbed at a few of the innumerable issues whirling in the cyclone of my mind and tossed them at her, in no particular order of importance. “Peg, he’s
late.
For everything. No . . . no grasp of time management! He doesn’t
plan
. He grew up in a house that was orange and is now
pink and purple
. He shoots animals. Deer! I saw the dead deer that he killed. Its head is on their wall.”
“Really?” She looked a little queasy.
“Yes! He’s practically Ted Nugent.”
“Ew. Did he use a crossbow?”
“I guess—no wait—I don’t know! What difference does it make? He killed Bambi’s father!”
“Okay. The deer thing requires a little adjustment.”
“Also: He didn’t go to college.”
She shrugged. “Does he need to?”
“And he drinks. A lot. He smokes marijuana. His parents are potheads who gave him
whippins
when he was a child. His dad is a Hell’s Angel. His sister is Xena. His grandmother is . . . well, she’s just plain awful.”
“Grace—you hear yourself, right?”
How could she still look so unperturbed? “Okay, how about this: He talked me into doing drugs.”
Finally, she was appropriately taken aback. “What do you mean?”
“I smoked marijuana with him.”
“Grace!” She looked amused.
“It’s not funny.”
“Well, it’s interesting.”
“Peg. Look at his life. The late nights in bars and clubs. You’ve seen all the girls, and you know he takes full advantage. He is on a wild ride right now, and loving it.”