London Is the Best City in America (18 page)

“What she’s doing in Paris?” I asked. “Your girlfriend?”

“My girlfriend?”

Who was it that said you should never ask a question unless you’re ready to hear the answer? Was that just a Josh-ism too? I still was having too much trouble listening to it.

“Yes.”

He smiled at me. “Well, my
ex-
girlfriend, Lily, was just transferred to her firm’s Paris office,” he said. “She’s a tax attorney.”

And he stopped there, not saying the rest of it. But I could start to hear it anyway: Matt getting a great job at a small French architecture firm, his first well-deserved break. He would start to love the city, explain to me one day that he just hadn’t understood it before, but how, now, he was going to every small alley-café, every out-of-the-way gallery. How, tramping down the streets late at night, he found the hidden chapel behind the Champs-Elysées where the symphony practiced at midnight on Tuesdays, the front pews always empty.

Matt stubbed out his cigarette on the ground beneath the bench, clearing his throat while he did it. I stared at the cigarette. It was sinking in the ground, which was wet from the water, full of little puddles of mud.

“But it’s my son I’m talking about,” he said. “He’s the reason that I’m trying to go there now.”

I was sure I’d heard him wrong. “What?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what to say,” I whispered. And I didn’t. I started doing admittedly faulty math in my head, trying to figure the dates out. His son would be what now?
Could
be what? Two if he started seeing Lawyer Lily right after us. His son could be as old as two years old. “Do you have a picture?”

He felt around in his pocketless T-shirt, his empty jeans. “Not on me, I don’t think,” he said.

But it didn’t matter anyway. The little boy was all I could see now. This sweet little baby. Matt’s eyes and coloring. Someone else’s nose and chin and long fingers. Someone else’s lips.

“His name’s Nathaniel.”

“After your . . . grandfather?”

“Her father, actually. Her father had that name too. He died right before Nate was born last year.”

I held my hand above my chest, staring at him. I thought it would suffocate me—my heart—it was beating so fast out of me. Matt was someone’s father now. He had become someone’s father. All these images of him came into mind: walking in the park, changing a diaper, standing crib-side. Someone needed him for these most basic things, and I knew he was doing them, giving all he could. But the weirdest part was that he was looking at me so apprehensively, so carefully, like that wasn’t the trick of it—of what he had to say to me. Like there was still more to come.

“Matt, I feel like I should be saying more, but it’s just so much,” I said, hoping there wasn’t more, hoping I was wrong. “From ice hockey to Nathaniel in under five minutes.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No.” I reached out and touched his arm. It was the first time I had touched him. “Don’t be. I think that’s how it happens.”

He looked down at my hand on his arm, before looking back up at me, meeting my eyes. I followed his eyes with mine, wanting to say something else. But before I could, he did. “Then forgive me,” he said. “From going from there to this.”

And he kissed me. He just leaned in and—just like that. It was so soft that I almost missed it. So soft and scared and light. There was no time to argue with it, almost no time to really even feel it.

As he pulled away, I felt stuck in place. My face still next to his. I couldn’t seem to move.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For which part?” I said. His breath right near my neck. His breath still a little too near.

“You should know,” he said. “You’re the reason I came home this weekend. You’re the reason I’m here. I read your brother’s wedding announcement in the paper, and I thought, I’ll go home. I won’t go find her, but at least I’ll go home. And if I see her, I was supposed to see her. If I see her, I’ll figure out a way to say what I want to say.”

I was waiting to hear the rest of it—what he thought he was supposed to say—but it was like I was hearing just the beginning again and again.
You’re the reason I came home.

I moved closer to him.

“It all sounds better in my head,” he said. “I love Lily. She gave me Nathaniel. I can’t be sorry about that. But it’s just not the same. With her or with anyone else. Things just aren’t the same as they were with us.” He paused. “When things were good with us, they were so good. Don’t you think? Everything else just feels . . . less honest or something.”

I tried to think of what to say back. I felt like I should say something back, if for nothing else than because he had managed to do that thing that only he seemed to know how to do: say something that fit perfectly into an empty place inside me.

“And I know that I cut out on you at the end of things with us. I know I really stopped being there,” he said. “But I had all this stuff going on, and I couldn’t manage to talk to you. It was hard sometimes with you. I knew that you still wanted me there, but there was a disconnect between what you were feeling and what you showed you were feeling.”

I nodded because I did know. I did know that. I felt myself disconnect when I got scared. I felt myself, in the most important ways, and at the very worst times, disappear. Wasn’t that what my whole life was starting to become in a way? A great disappearing act? Even from myself?

“Matt,” I said. “I want to say something about that day in the motel room. I am sorry for how I left. I shouldn’t have done it like that, obviously. I guess that’s very obvious. But the thing was, I knew if I didn’t do it right then, literally, I wouldn’t be able to ever. I loved you so much still, and I could feel it. I could feel that you had stopped.”

He nodded. “I get that.”

“Really?”

“No.”

He smiled when he said it, but it was an angry smile. Then he shook his head, and looked down. He was staring at the branches on the water’s edge. I knew he wanted to pick one up so he could have something to do with his hands. It was that or he’d take another cigarette. I bent down and handed him a branch.

“What’s that?” he said. “A peace offering?”

I smiled. “If you’ll take it. And if you’ll tell me the truth.” I cleared my throat, bracing myself against it—what I was about to ask. What I hadn’t, just yet, given myself permission to ask. “Who was she?”

“Who was who?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. I had been too scared to ask then, too scared to even let myself know there was something to ask. But with everything that had been happening over the last couple of days, I didn’t feel so scared anymore.

“The woman you were involved with,” I said. “At the end of us, I mean. Was it Nathaniel’s mom?”

He didn’t say anything at first, but I could see in his eyes that he was thinking of what to say. I could see him trying to decide how to be most fair. He turned and looked out at the water, away from me, which was a dead giveaway that he didn’t have any idea.

I tried to help. “It was someone else?” I said for him. “Besides her? Besides Lily, I mean?”

“It was someone else.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t think you knew about her,” he said. “Even when you left like that, I didn’t think you did.”

“I didn’t,” I said. Because even if in the back of mind it had been a possibility, I hadn’t seen it—hadn’t let myself see it—until right now, this very weekend, where all around me people were missing signals they weren’t ready for yet themselves.

He turned back to me. “I don’t know what to say to you about it now,” he said. “Without sounding like a self-help book.”

I smiled. “She wasn’t the cause of things between us, she was the result? I know all that.”

“Do you?”

I nodded. Because I did. Because someone else seemed to be the least of it, all this time later, if he still wanted to be sitting here with me. If he had been with someone or had almost been with someone—or I had left him, or almost left him—wasn’t the more important point that we came back to each other now? Wasn’t that at least as important as the rest?

“I don’t know how to tell you I want to try again. . . .”

“Slowly would be nice,” I said.

He smiled at me. “I still have the engagement ring, you know,” he said. “That you left behind. I’ve kept it at my parents’ this whole time.”

I’d always been superstitious about engagement rings in general, and that didn’t change when Matt gave me one. I couldn’t shake the feeling that instead of being a token of affection, engagement rings had turned into a twisted type of bragging rights, which was something I feared people were punished for. I knew how much I loved him, and hadn’t been worried—at the time—how he felt about me. I didn’t think we needed a ring to prove anything.

“I just figured you’d sell it back,” I said. “You knew I didn’t really want it in the first place.”

He threw the branch far out into the waterfall—the branch I had given him. It hit with a
crisp, crisp.
Then it disappeared.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I kept it.”

It was exactly midnight when Matt dropped me at my parents’ house. There were still a few cars on the block, but the caterer seemed to be all packed up. Most of the lights inside the house were off, and both flower buggies were gone. The event, from out here at least, looked as though it had wound down.

We sat outside for a while, staring at the house, as if something were going to change—as if something were going to sneak out and surprise us, interrupt us. Or maybe that was just me. Maybe Matt was waiting for something else.

When nothing happened, we made plans to meet late tomorrow night—midnight, post-wedding—at the diner on Central Avenue we’d always gone to, to talk some more there. To keep talking about all of this.

I didn’t want to talk anymore tonight. All I wanted tonight was for Matt to kiss me again. This I wanted maybe more than anything, but I was afraid to do it myself. I was afraid of what that would open up.

So instead I kept talking, probably more than either of us wanted me to, about the only thing I couldn’t seem to stop talking about, especially when I didn’t have an answer for it yet myself.

“One last question,” I said. “You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, but . . . what was she like?”

“Who?”

I didn’t say anything, waiting for him to figure it out himself. He looked out at the street, and I followed his eyes—followed Matt’s angle of it. The first time he’d ever driven me home, he’d sat here for a long time after I went inside. What was he thinking of then? It couldn’t have been how impossible it would all one day become for him, so impossible that he’d look to someone else to simplify it. To simplify it, and complicate it, and give him a way out.

“I’m not asking for the reason you think,” I said. “I’m not being masochistic or anything. I’m just trying to understand.”

“Understand what?”

I wasn’t ready to answer him. I wasn’t ready to tell him about what was going on with Josh. I didn’t want everything in my life to be about Josh, but it seemed like it was somehow, until I could figure out a way to untangle it again.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I guess she was a little like you, actually. She was wacky and graceful and really smart. Well, maybe the graceful part isn’t that much like you.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“No, she was just this person who made me feel good. What I remember about her most was that she had this weird obsessive-compulsive thing when she could only go to sleep if the clock was on certain numbers. I liked that for some reason. I liked waiting up with her when the time was coming out all wrong.”

“Okay, this game is over,” I said. “Not a good idea. Not a very smart game to play.”

He put his hands on the steering wheel, and turned and looked at me—really looked at me.

“The point is that it was a mistake. And I’m not saying that to be nice. I’m not saying it for anything except that I’m telling the truth. I’ve thought about it a lot since then. And I’ve always been sorry that I stepped outside of us like that. It was the only time. I guess that doesn’t matter much. But whatever questions I was hoping to answer, Em, she didn’t change the most basic part. Which was that I loved you.”

If it weren’t all so unfunny, I would have started laughing. I would have started laughing right then because this was the absolute most he’d ever said to me at one time. Why was that how it worked? Why could we say more to each other when it counted less?

I looked down at my hands. “The thing is that I think that Josh may be ruining things for himself, and I’m just not sure how to help him.”

“Things with Meryl?”

“And Elizabeth.”

“And Elizabeth.” He nodded, taking this in. “Wow. Well, I don’t know. But maybe it’s not your job to help him.”

“It feels like it is.”

“I can understand that. But if it makes you feel any better, he probably already knows what he’s going to do. I mean, in terms of the two of them, even if he hasn’t said it out loud yet. He knows which way he has to go. He is probably just figuring out how to make himself do it.”

I looked over at him. “Did you know?”

He nodded slowly. “I was going to marry you,” he said. “There was no question. That’s what I was going to do.”

I didn’t say anything, but I felt this incredible relief at hearing him say it—and then, almost simultaneously, this incredible sadness. If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you got there? Didn’t it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?

“You know the weirdest part? I told her right before we left for Maine that weekend. That last weekend. I told her it was over, for good.”

I tried to take this in, what I had done that weekend—that night in the hotel room—just at the moment, it seemed, before he came back to me. Was it really true that he would have, if I had let him? It didn’t seem possible—and seemed completely possible—that I had needed to wait just one night more.

“Well, that just seems like the most unfair part,” I said.

“To whom?”

“Everyone.”

He smiled, and I smiled back. It was weird because—while I did it—I felt myself taking a snapshot of the way he looked right then, trying hard to hold it, imprint it really, so I could lock it in. Then I leaned all the way across him, turning the ignition back on for him.