“Please don’t cry,” I say, hoping this is enough to stop him. “Please, just tell me more about Paris. It sounds like heaven.”
“Yes, okay.” I see him fighting against himself. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m such a fucking pansy these days.”
“It’s fine.”
It’s not fine! This is not living in the moment!
“I just…oh god, this sounds so lame, but what the hell. It’s just that Paris was when I decided that I had to marry you, that you looked so goddamn sad over your confession, and well, your dad, and I just wanted to protect you from everything that had already happened. Even though I don’t think I even knew the bulk of what had happened, still, that’s what I wanted. We were standing in Notre Dame, staring up at the stained-glass windows, and I know it sounds cheesy, like one of those asinine commercials that I’d score, but I looked at you, and the light was bouncing every which way, and I just thought: This is it. She is it. I’m with her until the day I die.”
“Until you weren’t,” I say, and instantly regret it. Because now we are officially
not
living in the moment. Now we are dragging the whole mess of our shit into this moment with us.
“Until I wasn’t,” he concedes. “Like there are any other ways that I can say I’m sorry for that. If there were, I’d say them, too.”
“No, don’t. I’m sorry. I’m the one who shouldn’t have said that. I was out of bounds.”
I fall silent, and since there’s nothing more to say about that, and
the Paris story has run out of steam, I lean over and kiss him. Not because it’s my first instinct but because maybe my doctors and therapists and—god help me—my mother, who e-mailed me three days ago to urge me to
share my body again with my husband,
are right: maybe it’s time to reconnect, and the only way to find out is to jump in feet first. So I jump; I leap before I look, run before I can walk, as Liv might say, though she’s already implored me not to.
I kiss him hard, and he kisses me back, then pushes me away. I can still taste the Cookie Crisp and the Molson on his tongue.
“Are you sure?” he asks. “Are we past the other stuff? I mean, is it in the past?”
Everything is in the past! Everything and nothing and god knows what else all at once!
I want to scream.
“I am. We should be. It is,” I answer, though what I should really say is that
I might be, we’ll try, who knows?
But I am wearing my guts on my sleeve now, and I can’t stop the momentum of where Peter and I need to go. My mom was right.
It’s only sex, dear!
she’d said in her e-mail, to which I hadn’t replied.
He leans over and kisses me again slowly, softly, almost barely there, and I wonder if I’m kissing the way that I’ve always kissed, and if he’s doing the same.
“I can’t believe you initiated,” he murmurs. “You never used to.” He kisses me more forcefully now, and I try to keep up, but he’s almost frantic, bearing down too hard. My lips feel puffy, my face braised from his two-day-old stubble.
“Slow down,” I remind him. “Slow down or you’ll hurt me.”
He stops and checks himself, then smiles a smile both sad and joyful.
He starts to unbutton my top. “Never.”
Our doorman buzzes
two hours later. “Sending up your sister,” he says, then clicks good-bye.
Peter is asleep in the bedroom and has been for the duration of our post-sex window. Afterward, he oohed and aahed over what we had managed to do to each other—despite my formerly fractured body, despite my formerly (and possibly still current) fractured trust in him, despite, well,
everything.
But afterward, I could tell it was a losing battle with his sinking eyelids, and soon enough, his breath grew patterned and his chest rose and fell, and I wobbled back to the couch and flipped on the TV. The sex itself was good, though again: no reference point. But it seemed good enough. I might not have remembered having slept with him before, but well, I seemed to remember
how
to sleep with him at least, and we laughed—both of us relieved—that I hadn’t forgotten
everything
.
“What’s with the bedhead?” Rory says as way of greeting when I swing open the door, and then lock it behind her. I shrug and look at the floor. “Oh no, you didn’t!” she says.
“He’s my husband. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with it!”
“I’m just…surprised. Knowing what you now know. I wouldn’t have pegged you for this type of reaction.” She stares at me for a bit, chewing on a thought she opts not to share. “You really are more like Mom than I realized.” She steps into the kitchen and emerges with a Diet Coke.
“I wouldn’t say that. Why would you say that? Ugh, god, please don’t say that.”
“Oh, she and Dad patched things up more times than I can remember. You got that gene, I guess, though I wouldn’t have pegged you
for it before all of this. You know your nickname in high school was Ice Queen.”
“That’s original,” I say.
“Well, don’t blame me,” she answers. “I didn’t give it to you. It started when you slipped on a patch of ice your sophomore year and broke your wrist. You went to a party anyway, ignoring the pain, until your arm swelled up like an elephant limb, and Aaron Sacks, the senior who had invited you there, drove you to the ER. Mom was stuck at home with me, and Aaron stayed with you all night, through the X-rays, the cast, all of that, and then—the way you told it from the way he told it—you refused to kiss him good night. The Ice Queen was born.”
“I had standards.” The new me tries not to betray her disappointment in the old me, that I couldn’t have made out with him just a little. Just a fraction of a French kiss! Would that have killed the old me?
“Then explain this,” she says, gesturing toward the bedroom. She pales. “Shit, that was too mean. No, you did have standards…I just…well, like I said, you were different before. This isn’t what I was expecting, that’s all. I guess I just didn’t get the same gene.”
The soda hisses as she opens it, and then, out of nowhere, she drops onto a dining chair, emitting some sort of animal sob, her shoulders heaving and shaking. It takes me a moment to realize that she’s crying.
“Jesus, Rory, what? What’s wrong? Is it Peter and me?”
She looks up at me, batting her hands in front of her face, her mascara gruesome under her eyes, her nose already pink and running amok.
“It’s Hugh. We broke up.”
“What? Why?” I help her—we help each other really—to the
couch. That goddamn unsightly disgusting gold couch. Despite my mess of a sister in front of me, I resolve to get to a furniture store like, this week. Like, yesterday. I cannot take another second of this monstrosity in my home. My former me’s home.
“Oh, I don’t know! No, I do know, but I don’t really know!” She moans. “We’ve been fighting…I wanted to get married, he wasn’t ready…I gave him…oh shit, Nell, I gave him an ultimatum. I mean, it’s not like I’m getting any goddamn younger here! It’s not like my ovaries are going to wait around forever!”
“You’re only twenty-seven, Rory,” I say kindly, trying to erase a mental image of my own ovaries, bruised, marred, expunged. I live in the moment and instead focus on the couch. Maybe I’ll get something in a burnished red or a surprising shade of sea blue.
“Well, it’s too late now!” She stands and starts pacing frantically, and I pull myself back to her, sensing her desperation. “It’s too fucking late now! I gave him a time frame, and he blew past it, and now it’s just too little, too late! I screamed at him, and he screamed at me, and we said things we shouldn’t have said—he actually called me a demanding bitch and I might have called him a noncommittal prick, and now it’s just all one giant effing mess!” She flings her hands in the air for extra drama and then flops back on the couch.
“People say things they shouldn’t all the time,” I say. “That’s the easy fix, that’s why we have apologies.”
“No, it’s more than that,” she says quietly, her voice cracking. “I see how precious life can be. I see you, and that you almost died, and I see what’s been taken away from you, and I just can’t settle for his noncommittalness for one more second.”
“Noncommittalness?”
“I probably just made that word up.” She snorts, half grief, half gallows humor. “But like I said, I think I just don’t have that
gene…to settle.” She shakes her head. “Not that you’re settling. Jesus. I’m sorry. You know what I mean.”
I don’t, but it seems easier to ignore the comment than make something more of it than it needs to be. Rory doesn’t know crap about forgiveness and isolation and despair, so why even bother?
“Things seemed perfect with you two last weekend.”
“Don’t judge what you can’t see. Closed doors and all of that. If you could remember Mom and Dad, you’d know as much.” She hesitates. “Actually, on second thought, maybe you wouldn’t.”
“Oh, Ror, you’ll figure it out.” I pull her head onto my shoulder and let her rest there, until the phone rings, jolting us both.
The nerves snap in my hip from moving too quickly and my earlier romp with Peter, a quick reminder that I’m not what I used to be.
“Erg, hello?” I manage when I pick up the phone from the pass-through on the third ring.
“I’m a block away,” Anderson says. “I’m coming up.”
I glance at Rory, who has flopped back on the couch, her arms thrust over her face.
“Now’s not a good time.”
“For me either,” he says, and it’s only then that I detect his drunkenness, his ever-so-slight slurring of words.
Formeeither.
“And, you are
not
supposed to be drinking, mixing your meds!”
“Tell me about it, Mom,” he says. “I’ll be there in two.” The line goes dead.
“I take it that wasn’t my boyfriend calling to beg for my forgiveness?” Rory says.
Before I can answer, Peter pokes his head out of the bedroom door.
“Hey,” he says sleepily, “what’s with the commotion?”
“What’s not with the commotion?” Rory says. “Hugh dumped me, Anderson is drunk, and you are very lucky to have gotten laid.”
His eyes bulge, and I shrug, and we both realize there’s no getting around it, so what the hell anyway. He moseys in and sits in the armchair opposite the sofa. He and Rory size each other up warily. The phone clangs again with my doorman’s announcement of Anderson’s arrival.
Anderson smells of bourbon when I kiss him hello, his cheeks pocked with sweat from the Labor Day heat wave.
“The paps followed me here,” he says. “No one leave for a while. They’re waiting outside.” For a second, I remember how different we are, how far apart our worlds were before they literally collided.
“As if anyone here is in any condition to go anywhere,” Rory mutters. “Besides, shouldn’t you be in Saint Barts or the Hamptons, somewhere fancy, other than here?”
“I can’t take the travel right now,” he says from the kitchen. He leans into the sink and douses his face with water, staining the color of his faded green hipster tee.
“What distillery did you fall into?” I ask.
“Don’t judge,” he answers, then straightens himself and pours a glass of water.
“It’s hard not to,” I answer.
“Judging is her specialty,” Rory says, still prostrate on the sofa, “at least when she wants it to be.” Peter raises his eyebrows and washes his hands over his face.
“Shut up, Rory,” I say. And just like that, we’ve unraveled.
She glances unobtrusively at Peter, then to me.
“You’re right,” she says, genuinely contrite. “That wasn’t fair. Ignore me. I’m just a mess right now.”
“That’s beautiful,” Anderson interjects.
“Oh, you shut up, too, and cut the sarcasm,” I snap, startled at how quickly I can turn, how quickly my flip can switch.
I’m supposed to be living in the moment! What is wrong with all of you that you’re all goddamn ruining it?
“I wasn’t being sarcastic—I was talking about the painting.” He gestures to the sunburst—or whatever it’s intended to be—over the mantel.
“It’s my dad’s,” Rory and I say in unison.
“Jinx,” she says, but no one has the energy to laugh.
I turn toward Anderson. “Oh, well, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He shrugs.
I sink next to him on the couch and assess the sad lot of our situations. Eventually, Anderson starts breathing deeply next to me, and Peter retreats uninvited to the bedroom, and Rory, too, stretches out in the armchair, her feet propped up on the ottoman. I pull a blanket over Anderson, then her, and then lean back against the pass-through, staring at my father’s brilliance, how I’d kept this magnificent, unavoidable reminder of him in my house, my home, the one place I could have exorcised him entirely. I stare at the reds and the golds and the biting black shards and absorb this contradiction, this realization that despite the many ways that my father scarred me, I never fully let myself heal.
What had Liv said?
That everything within our control is a choice. I close my eyes and wonder which feels farther away: the time when I once had control or the time when I had a choice in the matter anyway.
14
R
ory and I converge at the gallery on Monday morning, with a plan to go couch shopping afterward—my attempt to regain control, to have a choice in the matter over my old life, over my new life. Anderson, because he is bored and can’t stand to be alone with everyone gone for the holiday weekend, joins us. “Besides,” he said over the phone, “I’ll sweet-talk the staff at Crate and Barrel and get you a discount. They do that for actors, you know.” I sighed and wondered how someone could be both amiable and insufferable at the same time.
I’ve tried to go without sleeping pills for the weekend, anxious of becoming dependent, so rest has come in fits and starts, and last night was no exception: me, staring at my alarm clock at 2:32 a.m., and now my eyes feel like marshmallows. Too puffy to open properly. Anderson hands me an extra venti latte he thought to pick up for me.
“Ah, you read my mind,” I say, feeling momentarily guilty for faulting his earlier display of narcissism.
He guzzles his own cup. “Insomnia. It’s robbing us of our last shred of dignity. You look like a train wreck, I feel like a train wreck.” But he smiles as he says this. We both know we could have lost much more by now.