The Stuff That Never Happened (29 page)

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “I really loved Grant.”

“Until you fell in love with somebody else.”

“Well, no, actually, you want the truth? I loved both of them, through the whole thing,” I said. “I kind of still do.”

She laughed. “You love both of them.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They each brought out different parts of me, but I could have been happy with either of them. It wasn’t really my idea to leave Grant, even. I left him because Jeremiah was so miserable. But my choice would have been that we just kept going the way we were, with me loving both.”

“You’re something, you know that?” she said, and she was smiling at me in amazement. “As my grandmother would say, if you don’t beat all. You can’t have two!”

“Apparently not. But why not? They’re both such amazing—”

“No, no, no,” she said. “This way lies madness. I think you need to decide what you really want in your life and then stop flailing around and make it happen. What is it that you, Annabelle McKay, really want?”

“I want to go back to Grant,” I said, and I realized as I was saying it that it was true. I missed having somebody who cared about me, who wasn’t all flashing lights and craziness, a guy who came from steadiness and realness.

“Well, that’s what you need to work toward, then,” she said.

“No, he won’t ever take me back. The one thing he said was that I couldn’t ever come back. He might even be seeing somebody new by now.”

“Yeah, well, until you’re divorced, everything’s negotiable,” she said.

AFTER THAT, I decided that I would run into him on the street one day, sort of accidentally on purpose. It wouldn’t be that hard. He had habits I remembered. He liked cinnamon raisin bagels from a bagel shop around the corner from our apartment, and so for three consecutive Saturday mornings, I planted myself in the shop, hoping he would happen by. He didn’t. Then I got bolder and started loitering near his subway stop—and one rainy Friday night, bingo. There he came, holding a briefcase and an umbrella, and hurrying with his head down. He was wearing khaki pants and a rumpled blue shirt and sweater, and his hair was shining in the drippy glow of the streetlight. He walked right past me, without even looking up.

I slunk home and told Magda that he obviously hated me.

“I can’t believe he didn’t see me standing there,” I said.

“Well, of course he hates you,” she said cheerfully. “You took the guy’s heart and stomped on it and then threw it up in the air and let it crash on the pavement, where you stomped on it again.” She took me by the shoulders and shook me. “Girl, you betrayed him with his best friend in the world. Would you even
want
a guy who would take you back right away? He’s going to ignore you as long as possible. You have to fight for him.”

Then one day she came home and said, “Okay, I called him up today, and he’s agreed to see you.”

“You did what?” I dropped my purse on the couch and sank down next to it.

“I called him,” she said. “And I told him that you and he should talk again. At first he said no, but then he sighed and said okay. He wants to meet in Donovan’s Coffee Shop on Saturday morning.”

I was sweating by the time I got there, and my hair was all wildly frizzy and curly, but he looked—I have to say—even more terrible. Like he hadn’t been sleeping or ironing his shirts. I was overdressed, but I had worn a skirt since he had always liked my legs.

I watched how his hands shook when he tore open the little containers of cream to put into his coffee. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, but when I looked somewhere else, I could feel him studying me.

“How’s your work?” I said.

“Why are you still wearing your wedding ring?” He pointed at my hand.

“I … don’t know.” I put my left hand in my lap. “How’s your work?”

“The labor historian business has never been better.”

“Excellent,” I said. I told him that I was “doing my art” now—a thing he’d always nagged me about.

“And you’re living with Magda? That wasn’t the way I remembered the original plan.”

“Yes. I guess you already knew it didn’t work out for me and Jeremiah.”

“I figured as much.”

“He didn’t—well, that day … he didn’t tell Carly. He—”

“Please.” He held up his hand. “I don’t think I can stomach the details of this.”

“Of course not. Sorry. So how are things with you? Are you seeing anyone?”

He stared at me for a long time before he answered, like this was an impertinent question that I had no right to ask him. Then he cleared his throat and said yes, he was seeing someone.

“Oh, and is she living with you?”

He shrugged. “You know I don’t really believe in that.”

“Okay, so where did you meet her?” I stirred my coffee.

He let a long moment go by and then he said in a low voice, “At a conference.”

“Interesting! And now she’s in New York? Did she move here for you, the way I did?”

“Annabelle.” He shook his head in exasperation and laughed. “She lived here all along. She’s a historian, too.”

“So you and she … you talk labor statistics all the time? That must be fun.”

“Why are you doing this?” he said. “For what possible reason are you doing this?”

“Maybe I want to apologize.”

“Totally unnecessary. You did what you needed to do. But I think the time has come that we might want to think about the future. Decide what we’re doing here.”

“In what sense?”

“You know. In the legal sense that we’re not exactly husband and wife, so why not make it official?”

I took a long sip of my tea, mostly so I’d have time to think what to say. “Do your parents hate me? I’ll bet your mother told you just to go ahead and divorce me and write me out of your life,” I said. “She did, didn’t she?”

He hesitated a moment and then nodded.

“But your father was probably more on the side of caution. He said to give things some time.”

“My, my. It’s as if you were in the room.”

“Well, I’m with your father. I think we should give it more time,” I said. “I think we should go out to dinner next week and see how we feel after that.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Because—because we are open-minded, curious people.”

He looked at me steadily then, his eyes traveling all over my face, and I could see that he was wavering, that deep inside somewhere he was building up walls and fences as fast as he could, but that they were being torn down at the same time by my smile and my eyes. But then, when he was about to say yes, something happened. His mother showed up in his eyes. I saw her clear as day, saw him go cold on me.

“It’ll never happen,” he said. “I have to get going.” And then he called for the check, laid a five-dollar bill on the table, and slid out of the booth and out the front door, leaving me.

IT WAS stupid. I called Grant a few more times, but he always said he was busy. Four months later I started dating a guy named Luther, who was a sales rep at the publishing house. He was impossibly cute, but there was something kind of dangerous about him. He reminded me a little bit of Jay—he had that same sense of entitlement and expectation. They call that optimism, said Magda. She said I’d gotten so used to gloominess that I didn’t recognize it when I saw it.

“And you might as well have fun while you’re waiting for Grant,” she said. “You can practice your moves on this guy.”

She had broken up with the would-be fiancé and was now declaring herself on a lifetime plan of devotion to career, and possibly celibacy. I had pointed out to her that even though she might be correct that I was some kind of unformed chameleon who could adapt to anything, she was a
mule
who would adapt to nothing. Nobody’s agenda suited her. She was determined to do everything her own way. This pleased her no end. I couldn’t have paid her a higher compliment.

The next step—when it came—was entirely surprising and amazing and not choreographed by anything but fate. I was near Columbia on a drizzly, warm September evening and I hailed a cab, and when I went to get into it, Grant was somehow right there, too, having just come from his office and obviously thinking the cab was stopping for him. We both laughed when we recognized each other, and then I said magnanimously, “You take it,” and he did a little bow and said, “Well, why don’t we share it?”

I had just come from a meeting with a woman who had hired me to do illustrations for a children’s book about outer space, and my head was full of planets and galaxies and the glass of wine she and her husband had served me while we talked over the details. I was still
on
. I’d been complimented and praised for my initial sketches, and I was on my way home to get dressed for a dinner out with Luther—but seeing Grant there, looking so professorial and manly, made my heart stop in its tracks and decide to reverse course.

It was five o’clock; the cab inched along, and during the whole ride, I could feel Grant’s eyes on me. Everything felt perfect. It was as if I were imbued with a gigantic, supernatural energy. When we got to my apartment, I said, “Why don’t you come up, and I’ll cook us something.”

The timing could not have been better. Magda was away for the weekend; she’d gone to visit her sister, who was giving birth to her third child. And our apartment was spotlessly clean because we’d both felt industrious right before she’d left and had scrubbed the whole place down. Grant and I stopped at a little market and bought some cheese and bread and wine and grapes, and when we got to the apartment, I made pasta with the late-summer fresh tomatoes and basil. While he was in the bathroom, I sneaked the phone out onto the balcony and called Luther and told him I was sick.

Everything felt right: the jazz I put on the stereo, the way the light caught the gleaming copper pots, the fresh daisies on the table. I observed Grant walking around the apartment, pacing with his glass of wine, blinking behind his glasses. He stopped at the bookcase and I heard him suck in his breath. I knew what he was looking at: for a wedding present Magda had given us
The Joy of Sex
and
The Joy of Cooking
. “The joys,” we had called them. I still had them both, side by side on the shelf. He reached over and touched them, and I watched him from the kitchen and took another sip of wine. When he turned around, our eyes met and then he looked away.

He kept clearing his throat out of nervousness. While we ate dinner, we talked about his parents and his teaching load this semester, and then he asked about my brother.

“He’s not good,” I said. “I think he’s in a lot of pain, and he’s kind of hard to reach. I think he’s taking lots of drugs.”

“I always liked him,” he said. “The last time I talked to him he was saying that there was some surgery they might do, but he didn’t—”

“Really? You talk to him?” I said. “I didn’t know that. He never mentions it.”

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t really have anything to do with you,” he said. “I’ve always been fond of him. And it’s horrifying what he’s had to go through.”

“He told me once that he’s not going to be everybody’s favorite paraplegic, working to be a hero for the rest of us.”

“Yeah, he said that to me, too. He’s tried as hard as he can to push everybody away. You have to be pretty strong to stay David’s friend these days,” he said. “He’s a very sad, lonely, lost guy trying to fight his way back, and instead he’s fighting himself.”

This was another thing I’d missed—Grant’s sensitivity.

“I miss you,” I told him. “I miss you so much!”

He laughed a little bit. “No, you don’t. Not really.”

“I do. It’s been devastating how much.”

“Hey, could we skip the next reel of this movie? I’ve seen this one, and I really can’t go there again.”

“But I want to tell you. I know what I did was unforgivable, but—”

“Wait, Annabelle. Don’t say anything more. I need to tell you that I’m filing for divorce. I was going to write you a letter.”

“Wait. Do you mean to tell me that you decided to divorce me just while we’ve been here tonight? When I thought we were having such a nice time. Come on. Isn’t this nice, being together?”

“It’s very nice. But there’s nothing left, so I don’t see the point of drawing this out anymore. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and I think we should get our status ironed out, make it official, that’s all.”

“But don’t you see that I still love you? I don’t make pasta with tomatoes and basil for anyone else, you know.”

He was watching me warily.

I gestured in the air. “I mean, look at us here! Isn’t this what we always really needed? Time to be together and by ourselves? I’ve been so happy here tonight with you, and you can’t tell me you don’t feel the same. I saw the way you looked at ‘the joys.’ Remember that? How we laughed when we opened that present, and when—”

“Do you have to make everything so hard?” he said. “What’s left between us, anyway? We had a very, very short courtship and marriage, and now it’s ended.”

“But I love you!” I said.

He looked away. “No, you don’t. You only think you do because Jeremiah wouldn’t leave his wife after all. Otherwise, you and I both know that you’d be off with him right now making babies with him and helping him write his novel. That was what you wanted and you didn’t get it, and so I’m a handy substitute now that you’re lonely.”

“That’s not it, that’s truly not it. I made a big mistake. It was a horrible time for me, and I’ve done a lot of thinking about why I did what I did. I think I loved you
a lot
, but I was so young and stupid when we got married, and then that accident happened that made me go back home, and when I came to New York, I was still traumatized and didn’t even know it. And you were never there, Grant—you completely abandoned me, and I didn’t know anyone, and I just … I just … lost my judgment. I wasn’t in my usual right mind.”

He laughed. “I’m not sure you have a regular right mind.” He looked longingly at the door. “I’ve gotta go, Annabelle. I have to get out of here.”

“Grant, please don’t laugh at me. I mean this, what I’m saying. It’s our lives we’re talking about here. I’ve been trying for months now to tell you how sorry I am and how I want another chance. I made a terrible, terrible mistake. Ask Magda. She listens to me talk all the time about how much I love you and miss you.”