Maine (16 page)

Gabe had left the apartment and New York to follow a girlfriend to Boulder. But by the time of Maggie’s book party he was back in the city, newly dumped, living with Cunningham and working as a part-time stringer at the
Daily News
. During one of their first dates, he told her with pride about a computer file of stock images he kept for the occasions when they’d ask him to go shoot weather.

“You wouldn’t believe how stupid photo editors are,” he said. “I mean, all these requests to capture kids playing soccer on a sunny day, or snow falling on taxicabs, or—my absolute favorite—rainbows. They’re basically asking me to use and reuse the same shit, right?”

(Shortly thereafter, he was fired for doing just that. Now he got by on the odd freelance gig and biweekly checks from his father. The handouts embarrassed Maggie, but Gabe seemed to accept them just fine.)

Even then, so early on, she had a nagging feeling that she ought to run. This guy wasn’t an author, as she’d thought, but an overprivileged slacker photographer who had agreed to write a book about homemade porn. She told herself to stop being negative and look on the bright side. Perhaps he hadn’t finished it because he knew how gross it was. And now she’d never have to explain it to her parents.

He taught her how to deal with all the weird nuances of her own apartment: how to flush the toilet so the handle wouldn’t come loose, the correct way to screw in the antique glass light fixtures, his trick of slicing an orange and heating it up gently on the stove to kill the unpredictable mix of smells from the Korean restaurant downstairs. Mr. Fatelli had been there for years (Rhiannon had come along shortly after Gabe moved out), and he was somewhat baffled when he saw Gabe hanging around the place again, eventually seeming to settle on the belief that the two of them had lived there together all along. For some reason, things like this made Maggie feel like they belonged.

And if Gabe was a slacker, at least he was smart—his new place was filled with books, piled high on every chair and in each corner, mixed in with Cunningham’s ridiculously huge collection of eighties movies on VHS. On Saturday mornings they would sit and read on the couch, their bare feet touching, each of them occasionally pointing out a funny passage to the other.

Twice, Gabe had come over to trap and kill a mouse after midnight. He had put together her table and chairs from Ikea. On the morning of her thirty-second birthday, he woke her up with a homemade chocolate cake, a ring of glowing candles around the edge, like mothers always baked in movies set in the fifties. In his best moments, he seemed like someone who could take care of her. Though she was thirty when they met and in some ways had been caring for herself since she was a little girl, she found with some surprise that she wanted this, needed it.

Gabe had gone up to Boston with her for Easter the previous spring. He and her brother, Chris, goofed around in a back pew, struggling to be quiet in that way you do when something seems all the more hilarious because you know you cannot laugh out loud. Her aunt Ann Marie had shot them a look, and Maggie caught her eye, making a face that said she too disapproved. But in fact, she felt joyful watching her brother and her boyfriend, side by side. She imagined them being close for years to come—golfing in Ogunquit each summer, grilling out in the yard between the cottage and her grandparents’ place as their children ran this way and that, and fireflies zipped from tree to tree.

But she couldn’t always rely on Gabe. Once, sent out to pick up her prescription when she had strep throat, he got distracted by a friend from work, went for drinks, and ended up telling her to get the medicine herself—he was all the way in Manhattan, but if she really wanted, he’d be happy to pay for the delivery. They argued like crazy, almost from the start. Sometimes Gabe lied, even when the truth would do: He’d go out drinking with Cunningham until two a.m. and say he was on a photo assignment. He’d have a boozy lunch with an old girlfriend, and only fess up after Maggie unearthed the hundred-dollar receipt in his wallet. He seemed to get off on tricking her, making her wonder whether she was really as controlling as he said, or if he just had some sort of mommy complex, or both.

There were moments when her stomach sank a bit, when she wondered what exactly he was made of, and whether it could really last through the long haul. Like the night, a few months into their relationship, when they went with the Goons to a wedding in Gabe’s hometown in Connecticut. The wedding was an over-the-top affair, customary among Gabe’s rich friends. But even so, Cunningham and Hayes were behaving like—well, like Cunningham and Hayes.

Cunningham was one thing: boorish and annoying, but at least he tried to make conversation. Hayes still lived with his parents. He had an entire wing of his childhood home to himself, complete with a housekeeper. Half of what he said took the form of the phrase “
Something
this, motherfucker.” For example, when Gabe had asked him in the church before the ceremony started whether he had remembered to turn off his phone, Hayes replied, “Phone this, motherfucker.”

Hayes could hardly hold down a job, and seemed to live only in memory.

“Remember when Gabe’s car was stolen after college?” he said over dinner.

Cunningham snorted. “Yeah, poor Gabe. Insurance company took good care of you after you claimed the brand-new golf clubs in the trunk and the—what was it now?”

“Two thousand CDs,” Hayes said.

Cunningham pounded a fist on the table. “That’s right. Two
thousand
CDs. Big trunk that must have been. He didn’t have to work for a year and a half.”

“I worked,” Gabe said in a mock defensive tone.

“Oh sure, you worked at Mike’s Deli nine hours a week ’cause those guys were the easiest way to score coke in town,” Hayes said.

Gabe laughed uproariously. He didn’t look at Maggie. She felt her whole body tighten. She knew Gabe drank too much. She was sensitive about it because of her parents’ drinking, so she tried not to be a scold. But he had told her early on that like her, he had never touched drugs.

Hayes’s date gave Maggie a worried glance. “Who wants more wine?” she said.

“Wine this, motherfucker,” Hayes said, and he snorted with laughter.

Maggie pushed her chair away from the table and said she was heading up to their hotel room to bed, even though it was only nine thirty, and the cake hadn’t even been cut. The Goons and their matching blond dates looked up with alarm. Gabe’s big brown eyes pleaded with her not to make a scene.

He didn’t come upstairs until four a.m., reeking of scotch and knocking the suitcase off the dresser. He pulled his shoes and pants and shirt off clumsily, and climbed into bed beside her, where she had been lying awake for hours, watching the red neon minutes click by on the alarm clock. She wanted his arms around her, an apology, but she knew she wouldn’t get it, and it was no use fighting with him when he was drunk.

He switched on the TV—some stupid Adam Sandler movie at top volume. Her heart sped up, with the familiar mix of sadness and exhilaration that preceded a fight. She rolled over and faced him.

“Turn that down, please,” she said coolly.

“It’s not that loud,” he said.

“I was sleeping.”

“You made an ass of me tonight,” he said. “Why’d you have to go and do that?”

“You never told me that you used to do cocaine,” she said. “I was kind of in shock.”

“I used to do a lot of stuff before I knew you,” he said.

“Oh? Like what?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You said you’d never tried drugs,” she said, feeling like a naïve child in an after-school special.

“Well, I guess I lied. One more thing for you to hate about me.”

His tone was so indifferent that she began to cry.

“Do you do it anymore?” she asked.

“Jesus Christ, Maggie, lay off,” he said. Then he softened a bit. “I haven’t done it in years.”

“When was the last time?”

“God, I can’t even remember,” he said. “Come on. I love you. Why are you being like this?”

“And what was all that about the golf clubs and the CDs? Did you commit insurance fraud? I don’t understand it, because obviously you didn’t need the money.”

“Damn it, Maggie, are you a fucking undercover cop, or what?” he yelled. “Didn’t you ever do anything stupid or crazy when you were twenty-two years old?”

The answer, as they both knew, was no.

He switched the TV off and threw the clicker to the floor.

“I want you to go in the morning,” he said. “I’ve had enough. I’ll drop you off at the train first thing. I’ll get a ride back.”

They had been planning to stay two more nights, to visit his parents and older sister, but this was always how he punished her—pushing her away, telling her to go, because he knew she couldn’t bear it.

Tears crept from the corners of her eyes and down to her lips.

“Fine,” she said bitterly. And now came the regret, because he had told her he loved her, they had been so close to making up, but she kept pushing.

A moment later, he was asleep. She stayed awake until morning, thinking, thinking. Was it just the childhood imprint of watching her parents go at each other at the breakfast table or at one of her brother’s soccer games—screaming, shouting, storming off, only to make up again a few hours later? Is that why she fought with Gabe the way she did? Had she really been drawn to a hard-drinking, short-tempered man, when these were the exact traits in her parents that scared her the most? Her mother said that alcoholics tended to seek one another out as a way to make themselves feel normal. Maybe that extended to their children as well.

Maggie thought, as she often did at times like this, about her cousin Patty. She had been raised by the even-keeled, forever happy Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat, and she had easily fallen in love with and married Josh, her law school boyfriend who was sweet and kind. It really might be as simple as that—good model, happiness; bad model, despair.

Her shrink had said once that the right sort of relationship wouldn’t require so much thought. It would just fit. Maggie had wanted to point out that if that were true—if love actually came easy and stayed that way—the woman would likely be out of a job.

The problem was that you couldn’t divide a person up, pick and choose the parts you liked and the parts you didn’t. There were parts of Gabe that made her love him so much that she wanted to hold on to him forever, even though there was no such thing. She could actually cry at the thought of him dying before she did, when they were both in their nineties.

He stirred around seven o’clock, and she reached for him, running her hand down his stomach, dipping her fingers under the elastic band of his boxer shorts.

“You awake?” she said, feeling desperate for him, when he lay right there beside her.

He grunted.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been such a drama queen.”

Gabe opened his eyes. He grinned. “Damn woman, you’re Oscar-worthy.”

With those words came the familiar flood of relief: the fight was over, and it hadn’t ended them. She slid his boxers down and climbed on top of him, kissing his neck. He pulled off her T-shirt and licked her nipples in tiny perfect circles. They made love and afterward he ordered them eggs Benedict from room service, and made Maggie laugh with the story of how Cunningham’s girlfriend, Shauna, had passed out drunk on an ice sculpture after Maggie went upstairs.

“So, can I stay?” she said, in a child’s voice that she hated the sound of.

“Are you going to behave yourself?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Good, because I hate being away from you.”

“Me too.”

Things were fine between them for a few months after that. Gabe took her for a surprise long weekend in Berlin, and they had an amazing time popping into galleries and cafés. They stayed in a five-star palace, which had been the setting for the Greta Garbo film
Grand Hotel
. (Maggie sent her grandmother a postcard to tell her so.) She was impressed with how easily Gabe spoke to the locals, how charmed everyone seemed by him. She felt proud to be the one he had chosen.

But then one Friday night back in New York he canceled their dinner plans abruptly because he said he was coming down with a cold. She asked him if she ought to come over and bring him some soup, but he was tired and said he didn’t want to get her sick. He called her before ten and said he was going to bed. The next day, sensing that he had lied (he seemed perfectly healthy to her, and it wasn’t the first time she’d heard him pretend to be sick), Maggie looked through the call log on his cell phone while he was out picking up lunch, and there they were: two calls from the previous night, around three and four a.m., to a random number she didn’t recognize.

Feeling sick to her stomach, Maggie dialed the number from her own phone and heard a voice mail recording: “You’ve reached Stephanie. Leave a message.”

When he came home with sandwiches from the deli, she asked him about the calls. He went into the bedroom without saying a word and slammed the door, locking it behind him. She sat on the couch, still as stone, waiting. He returned to the living room twenty minutes later and screamed at her for snooping, saying he had been out with guys from college and didn’t always want her in tow. He needed his space, time away from her, if this could ever work.

“Whose number was that?” she said, shaking.

“One of the guys. You don’t know him.”

“Gabe, I called it,” she said.

He hung his head. “Oh.”

“So?”

“It’s not what you think,” he said, a phrase that never led anywhere good. “It’s the number of a dealer, someone who sells coke. It wasn’t for me, I swear. It was for these guys who were visiting.”

“I heard a girl’s voice,” she said.

“It’s a decoy. It always goes straight to that voice mail; you leave a message and they call you back,” he said. Then he actually began to cry, which she had never seen him do before. “You have to believe me. I don’t want to lose you over something stupid like this.”

Somehow she ended up feeling relieved by his explanation. At least he hadn’t cheated; at least he still loved her. It wasn’t until a week or so later that she considered the fact that Gabe had the number of a cocaine dealer. She didn’t know anything about cocaine, but she knew enough to realize that there was a difference between occasionally trying it at a party, say, and being the guy with the hookup.