Life After Yes (24 page)

“Let…me…get…this…straight…” I say, my voice eerily calm like those September minutes before everything happened. “While I was uptown comforting my insta-widow mom, processing the fact that my
dad
was buried under a pair of buildings, you were staking your claim?”

And then my friend, my exceptionally clever friend, says two exceptionally unclever words, “I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry too,” I say, and stand. Chug the rest of the champagne and slam the glass down. “Cheers.”

I turn to leave.

“It was one kiss,” she says. “One meaningless kiss. Don't go.”

“That one kiss means something to
me
,” I say. “And, yes, I have to go. There's a wedding this weekend in case you don't remember? One to which you are no longer invited.”

“Q, you don't mean that,” she says.

And maybe she's right. Maybe I don't mean it. But I say it. And leave her there clutching her belly and her baby blanket. Before I walk out the door, I turn and look at her. And for the second time in one day, I see her cry.

T
oward my future, the cabbie drives fast—honking, swerving, cursing. A gold cross dances dangerously on the windshield.

I look at his license. His name is Bob.

It's rush hour and the traffic's a bitch. “I'm not sure you're going to make it,” Bob says from the front seat.

“Me neither,” I mumble. “Me neither.”

It only happened once.

And suddenly I'm hungry for details. Did he run his fingers through her hair? Tug her earlobe when he kissed her? Cup her chin as he pulled away? Was it just a kiss?

The more information the better.

Maybe not. Maybe a little mystery will save us.

Words convene mercilessly.

Phelps: No harm in a midnight snack.

Victor: This is what we do.

Sage: Good people fuck up. Forgiveness is underrated.

Mom: Men never know what to do.

Me: Good people can lie about most anything.

Bob pulls up to the terminal. “That was faster than I thought it would be,” he says. “You have plenty of time.”

But all I can think is:
Do I?

 

And Sage stands there waiting for me, flanked by our matching suitcases, an early wedding gift from his aunt, hugging a white garment bag.

My wedding dress.

The man behind the desk looks at our photo IDs. “No license?” he asks, scrutinizing my tattered passport.

“No,” I say. “Maybe someday.”

Sage smiles. “One of these days, she'll grow up,” Sage says to the man.

The man prints boarding passes and Sage reaches for them.

“I'll hold mine,” I say.

It's a start.

 

On the security line, I clutch my dress and look around. At the babies and old people, the bald heads and ponytails.

“Statistically, forty-three percent of these people drink away their demons and eighty-two percent of the women wear the wrong size bra,” I say.

And this is the beauty of trivia. We talk about things that don't matter when avoiding the things that do.

“Fascinating,” Sage says.

We take off our shoes. Arrange electronic devices in soiled gray bins. I lay my dress down on the rolling black rubber and watch as it appears on the other side.

At the sports bar, we find three bar stools. One for each of us, one for my dress.

“We had this magical afternoon,” I say. “I sat there with her as she saw her baby. And she's so happy. She's in love. I think she's looking for a fresh start.”

“That's good, right?” he says.

“In theory, yes,” I say. “But in practice, for some people having a fresh start sometimes entails admitting things. She told me about her birthday.”

He looks down.

“Nice birthday present, but I think the Veuve would have sufficed,” I say.

“You know something about fishing when you've already snagged one,” he says.

The bartender sees my dress and smiles. “Good luck,” he says, and hands us menus.

Thanks. I think we'll need it.

Sage sits there, sad and defeated, sipping Guinness, the black beer Dad used to love. Fear overtakes those blue eyes.

And just as I am about to wind up and let him have it, really let him have it, I have a flash of Phelps. Naked. On top of me in a cheap and generic hotel room. And then I say words that perhaps surprise us both. Words that Sage once said to me. “Life will go on. If we let it.”

Sage's eyes widen. Those pupils dilate. “Huh? You deem my mother the devil for giving us her mother's china. I kiss your friend and I'm off the hook?”

I nod, slowly but surely. “Enjoy this moment of temporary insanity while it lasts,” I say. But what I think of is those books I loved as a child, full of stories simple and profound. Despite the decisions and mistakes we've both made, we are both here, on the very same page. Maybe, just maybe, this is the way it was supposed to happen.

I shred a cocktail napkin into tiny pieces. And think of that night we first met. When everything was new and untarnished. When I wore those wings. “Sage, I'm sure you know this by now, but I'm no angel.”

A captive audience. A pseudo-confession.

He nods. “Neither am I.”

Our silence is filled with sudden and imperfect understanding, the conversation of others, a blaring basketball game, a weatherman predicting unseasonable snow.

It's then that my future husband orders two more pints of Guinness and finally asks me: “Are you happy, Quinn?”

I pause. Think about this. “I want to be,” I say.

He smiles.

“Me too. Do you think it's possible?” he asks. “To be really happy?”

“I don't know,” I say.

“Maybe happiness is a herd ideal,” he says.

And just when we are getting somewhere, finally getting somewhere, really getting somewhere, he quotes another philosopher.

“Borrowing from Nietzsche?” I ask.

“From him and from you,” he says, reaching into his bag for something.

He pulls paper from his bag.

“You gave this to me when we first met. When you were in law school,” he says, waving those sheets of paper. “You said it was proof you wouldn't become
one of them
.”

And then he reads some words from it.

“Nietzsche said,
It is
not
the satisfaction of the will that causes pleasure, but rather the will's forward thrust and again and again becoming master over that which stands in its way.
The feeling of pleasure lies precisely in the dissatisfaction of the will, in the fact that the will is never satisfied unless it has opponents and resistance. ‘The happy man': a herd ideal.

“Then you wrote this which I love,” Sage said. “
The good struggle had become a way of life and it wouldn't end at graduation. The JD would bring a new herd to abandon one day. Moving on would usher in a new cast of opponents and a fresh stock of resistance. Nietzsche's ‘forward thrust' would continue and they hoped, they knew, that they could manage. Stronger, rookie masters of the struggle that is life, they knew deep down that somehow, someday, they would just do it. Even when the real ‘it' still eluded them all.
”

I smile. I wrote that. Even then, I knew. “The good struggle,” I said. “Then it was theoretical. Now it's life. Our life.”

He nods, clutches those papers. “I've held on to this because it makes sense to me. The best things in life are never easy.”

Buzzed, we board our plane.

“When did you know about me?” I ask him.

“The night we met,” he says. “The freckles, the playful irreverence. I just knew. You asked me the next morning if I had any bacon and I didn't. I kept bacon in my fridge from that day on. You were different. You weren't like the others.”

And I can't help but notice that he speaks in the past tense.
You were different. You weren't like the others.

“The night you proposed, I had a dream,” I say.

I pull that crumpled stationery from the Ritz out of my bag and hand it to him. And I watch as he reads my words, scribbled down the morning after he asked me that all-important question. I watch as he reads about the trinity of grooms, and the jury, and his mother, and the blurry-faced judge. I watch
as he reads about the disappearing father and the screaming little girl.

He finishes reading, and maybe he sees the worry in my eyes because he smiles and says, “Bug, it was just a dream.”

I nod because I want to believe him. But still I wonder if it's ever just a dream?

He doesn't ask who the other guys were. Maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't care. Maybe it really doesn't matter.

“I just hope that on Saturday, you choose me,” he says.

And we take off.

The stewardess's name is Victoria. She asks if we'd like a drink.

“Keep them coming,” Sage says. “We're struggling to celebrate.”

And as the plane stumbles upward into darkened skies, I say, “I'm not sure I want to go back there.” To New York? To the law firm? To our sad and predictable dance of mutual deception? “Might be time to start over.”

But I think:
Can you ever really start over?

“Ah, so you have your new herd to abandon?” he says, and laughs. “Just do it then.”

“I want to write a story,” I say.

“Just don't start with a dream. Too clichéd. You'll end up in the slush pile.”

And I think:
We are a cliché.

“What? A post–9/11 New York story about a privileged Petra Pan who returns from her honeymoon and quits her high-paying job, jumps ship, and writes in an effort to find clarity is a bit cliché?”

“Not at all,” he says facetiously, smiling big.

“And don't write things like ‘the air was thick and smelled
like peanut oil' or ‘crucified the deep silence.' Too pretentious.”

“But I am pretentious,” I say. “And messy. And difficult…Are you sure you want me?”

“I do,” he says, smiling. “I do.”

And for a moment, we sit there silently, stirring drinks with our pinky fingers like my parents used to do. And the engine hums.

“You can't write a story about the law when you've barely set foot in a courtroom.”

“Of course I can,” I say.

It would be a story, not researched, but dreamed and lived. Full of bits and pieces gathered. It, like the slush pile that is life, would be formulaically seasoned, peppered with predictability and profanity and platitude. Because real people are often stereotypes and stereotypes are often real. Because at one time or another, we all struggle and swear and stumble. Because life is never a fairy tale no matter how much we want to believe.

This story would also have fierce flashes of rawness and honesty. Its characters wouldn't be perfect people, but gorgeously flawed Nietzschean souls. Souls who individually, and collectively, dance that fabled forward thrust. Souls who have no choice but to live the good struggle that is life.

I imagine coming home married. There would be chatter about my leaving the firm. Colleagues would whisper words of prudence: “Wait until bonuses. That's a lot of money even for someone who has money.”

But I'd think of all the people in those Towers who sleepwalked their way to work that morning, who counted down the days until they would allow themselves to do something else, to be someone else. Mortgage and tuition payments,
fear, or apathy, I-don't-know-what-else-I'd-do-with-my-life thoughts kept them there.

And then it all ended.

At the firm, they'd encourage my plan, though. “Writing a book? Good for you,” they'd say while thinking obvious thoughts:
Why did you go to law school?
and
At least she's not going to a competitor.
To them, this would all be code for taking a breather, setting up house before popping one out. Or maybe they'd assume that it was hard after everything that happened for me to keep up in this world. Anyway, I'd be just another woman full of untapped potential who opted out, leaving room for another generation of Porterhouses and Poultry to float to the top.

So very predictable.

They'd throw me a departure party like they do for all the associates who bow out. They'd serve the same shrimp curry and the same white wine, and those people whose lives I'd glimpsed would approach me gingerly, ostensibly wishing me luck, but really pleading that I be kind in characterizing them, and this world they for now can't, or don't want to, escape.

And I would giggle heartily, swallowing the generic well-wishes with the bad white wine. And I probably wouldn't say it, but I'd want to; that they have nothing to worry about. That I have nothing to vilify, that if I was going to rip anything apart, it would be a world far bigger than the four walls of this firm, a world of excessive ambition and privilege, of sadness too often camouflaged by designer clothing, and profanity, and booze, and distance. A world I could study and observe, of course, but one I couldn't myself escape if I tried.

I would pack up my office. The pens, the parched high-
lighters, the prudent stock of Excedrin ready to combat the inevitable late night headaches. I would scatter good-byes and a few awkward hugs.

“See you on the bookshelves,” a few would say.

I'd turn in my BlackBerry, my best friend and biggest foe.

And I would travel down in that elevator once more, eyes fixed on the little TV that reminds us of the life—and death—beyond this vertical grind.

I would click away on the marble floor and spin through the revolving door once more. The fresh air would feel different this time.

These thoughts zip through me like lightning, and momentarily, I'm empowered. High in the sky, I'm neither here nor there; this feeling is electric.

This is up to me.

Or maybe this is just another dream. It rivets as long as it lasts.

 

We sip drinks and talk. About how the most we can strive for is to be real, imperfect, honest. We talk about happiness. What is it? Is it attainable, or is the fruitless search for it what really makes people unhappy? I tell him about my theory that happiness comes in flashes. He doesn't use fancy words, but his own words. His grammar is less than perfect, but not bad. But for the first time in so long, it's his voice that carries. His own words. Not Plato's. Not Nietzsche's. Not our parents'. Not society's.

And I think:
We are judge
.

I look at him, those impossible deep blue eyes. The tears waiting, just waiting, to break free. And I see that fly fisherman on Halloween, that boy I first met.

“I miss him,” he says.

I nod.

“I miss him too,” I say.

And it doesn't matter that we're talking about two different people, two people who will never see us walk down the aisle. Or grow up.