Life From Scratch (22 page)

We take a cab over to her building, making small talk along the way. Gael points out a place where he once photographed a couple for their wedding, moments before their ring bearer vomited on the bride’s gown. We both agree that the hotdogs are particularly good from one street vendor when we pass the empty space where his cart stood hours earlier during the day. As I’ve said before, it is easy to be with Gael. He is uncomplicated, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. I feel my stomach unclench at some point during the cab ride. Laura is going to be very impressed with my beau.

And she is. I can see her eyes widen as she says hello to me but faces Gael, taking in his lopsided smile and carefully messy brown hair. She shakes his hand and accepts the house-warming bottle of wine that we purchased from the liquor store two doors down, before entering her apartment building. “And you’re from
Spain
!” she exclaims, after she inquires where his accent comes from. “I love
Spain
! If I could move anywhere in the world, it would be
Seville
. I just fell in love with that city.”

“Well, I am from
Madrid
,” he corrects. “It’s the middle of the country. Maybe six hours north.”

“Of course!” she corrects. “
Madrid
is exquisite. I had a wonderful time going to the little tapas bars at night.”

“Maybe you can talk Rachel into trying ham,” he says, looking around the room. Even I can tell that he’s bored, and I barely know him well enough to read his expressions. “I haven’t had any luck.”

“Rachel!” Laura practically shouts as if he has told her that I’ve been shooting tourists in Time Square instead of not partaking in meals made out of pig. She leans in close and whispers solely to me, “My boyfriend is in the kitchen right now. I need to tell you all about him. Un-be-liev-a-ble.
 
By the way, I should probably tell you something,” she begins.

We’re interrupted by the doorbell ringing again, and Laura places one finger up to ask me to wait, though we’re shunted towards the center of the room while another couple takes our place by the door to be interrogated by Laura. We give ourselves a self-guided tour to show that we’re interested and also because we’re nosy. New Yorkers are constantly mentally comparing apartments, worrying about where their own abode falls on the spectrum.

She has landed herself a small, two-bedroom, though the second bedroom is too small for a bed and serves more as an office. She has her office supplies neatly arranged next to her computer and several photographs of her cats in frames near the keyboard. It is as if she has recreated her workspace at home so she can play graphic designer in the same way that little girls play house. One of the cats rests on the table next to a picture of himself.

Her bedroom is plain and unassuming, beige walls and a crème colored comforter. But I am jealous of her doors—the doors that divide the two bedrooms from the hallway, even the door that divides the kitchen from the living room/dining room. It feels like she has moved up in the world while I have definitely moved down. Doors symbolize something—there has to be a reason why people work their ass off to move from a cubicle to an office to an office with a window. I am living a cubicle life while Laura has at least gotten the windowless office.

Gael leaves me in the living room to grab two beers out of the kitchen for us, and I sit down on the sofa next to a woman I vaguely remember from another office in the library. She confirms that she works in acquisitions, and we talk for two minutes about how she and Laura met by bumping into each other at the same deli every day and ordering the same thing: a turkey sandwich with lettuce and no mayonnaise. I look at the woman’s left hand. She is also unmarried. I wonder if she keeps framed cat pictures on her desk. I wonder how long it would have taken for me to do the same if I had stayed in my job post-divorce.
The framing of cats is a difficult matter
, I sing to myself.

“I haven’t seen you around though in a long time,” the woman says. I realize that I’ve already forgotten her name. “Why don’t you join us for lunch this week? You can always order something else.”

“Actually, I don’t do graphic design anymore,” I admit.

“Oh, what are you doing now?” the woman asks.

“I’m writing,” I say, trying it aloud with someone who I hopefully will never see again though knowing my luck will be the first person I bump into when I head back to my library job. “I’m writing a book.”

“Oh, that’s so exciting,” the woman says, and I can tell that she genuinely means it. “Is it a romance novel?”

“No . . . more like self-help. A divorce guide.”

“Oh, sort of the anti-romance novel,” the woman nods. “I love reading romance novels. I probably go through two or three a week.”

I see Gael coming out of the kitchen with the beers, so I excuse myself and make my way over to him. “Do you see what I mean at this point about enduring? You come and you drink a beer and you put another link on the friendship so you can call her up a few weeks from now for lunch and not feel awkward.”

“I’m going to call her?” Gael asks, surprised.

“No, I was using the second-person, but I meant me. I’ll call her to get coffee and catch up. But I wouldn’t be able to do that if I hadn’t come to the party. And I know a few other people here.”

“Which ones?” Gael murmurs, his mouth barely moving.

I glance to the side and take a sip of my beer. “That man over there. By the kitchen door? He’s Steve, and he also works in the design department. He steals stuff from the supply cabinet. Not just paper or tape but rolls of toilet paper. I’m sure he outfits his whole apartment in stolen goods.”

Gael snickers, and I can see that he is watching a blond woman by the window that I’ve never seen. I wait until he looks back at me to continue, taking note how many times his eyes flick back at her.

“The woman on the sofa, I know her from acquisitions. She just informed me that she likes to read romance novels.”

“Interesting,” he comments. He looks at the blond again so I look at her too. She isn’t that amazing. Really, the best thing about her is her cloud of blond hair. I casually shift my position, wedging myself in the sight line between the woman and Gael. He looks back at me again.

“Don’t you have boring work functions in
Spain
?”

“We do, but you don’t work with her anymore,” he says. “You don’t have to keep playing by the rules.”

I am about to tell him that we can leave once we finish our beers when his eyes flick over my shoulder again. I am about to finally call him on it, say it loud enough to embarrass him, when I hear
his
voice, the last person I ever wanted to bump into tonight.

How has
New York
gotten so small that my ex-husband and I are at the same party?

“It’s a relief that I’m out of it,” I hear Adam tell another man. “I was so miserable towards the end.”

He
was miserable?
 
Excuse me,
I
was the one who was burning a hole in the couch waiting for him to come home from the office each night.
 
I
was the one completely being ignored. I don’t even have the sense to close my mouth before he turns around. He glances over his shoulder and sees me gaping at him, and he instantly looks as if he has swallowed a thumbtack.

“Rachel?”

And this is how I end up seeing my ex-husband for the first time in over ten months.

This is exactly what I’ve been dreading. What I wanted for our first encounter was ample warning, dressed in something amazing (it doesn’t have to be full-out couture, but I would have loved to have been wearing the navy blue cashmere sweater that he always told me made my breasts look impossibly round and luscious), maybe carrying a copy of my book.

I wanted him to see me mid-laugh, so he knew with absolute certainty that at that moment in time, my life was better than his. I wanted him to be wearing something that was stained with soup. Maybe sweatpants with a hole that he didn’t know about on the ass seam. I wanted him to be dropping things, looking depressed, perhaps with an embarrassing breakout of acne across his forehead. One that he had been hoping beyond hope that I would never see.

Instead, he is standing there, looking perfectly respectable, no soup or ass-revealing rips in sight. He doesn’t even look embarrassed about having just described the last day of our marriage as the best day of his life. His face is instantly composed to reflect tentative friendliness. Whereas I am standing there, my mouth half-open, my new boyfriend staring at some blond woman behind me. I am the embodiment of surprise, of speechlessness. I am not wearing anything incredible. I am not feeling anything close to incredible. I am fairly certain that I have lipstick on my teeth.

I stall for time by saying his name back. “Adam!” Now the verbal ball is back in his court. He looks over at Gael and back at me.

“I wondered if you were going to be here when Laura mentioned that she knew you.
 
I didn’t have a chance to ask her,” Adam tells me evenly.

“I worked with Laura at the library,” I tell him. “How do you know her?”

Adam pretends to look surprised at my past-tense reference to the library. Sneaky, blog-lurking ex-husband. He has become very cricket-like these last few weeks—first popping up on the blog and now popping up at a party. You just never know where he’ll jump next.

“I met Laura through her brother.”

Adam glances at Gael again, who smiles serenely at both of us, as if he’s watching a particularly tasty morsel-of-a-scene from a Spanish soap opera.

“Adam,” I say reluctantly. “This is Gael. Gael, this is Adam.”

Gael immediately recognizes my ex-husband’s name and behaves accordingly, putting an arm around my shoulder as he leans forward to shake Adam’s hand. Adam’s eyebrows rise with understanding, and his face slides deeper into unreadability. I focus on a curl of his hair resting right over his ear. He has grown his hair out a bit—it looks longer, less sculpted, more as it did when we were in graduate school except peppered with grey. I have to hold my hands behind my back because I have such a strong impulse to tuck it out of the way.

I am still attracted to my ex-husband even if he is happy to be rid of me.

I’ve known his face for so long that I can’t help but allow my eyes to travel to all my favorite spots. It’s like revisiting your old college and needing to grab a beer at the same familiar bar, check if your graffiti is still there. In our silent pause, I examine the small grooves on his lower lip, a scar of unknown origin on his jaw line, the stubble I used to love to scratch my finger against. I check to see if that small gap of eyelashes on his lower right lid still exists. If his ear lobes are still detached. I have this urge to tell a joke and get him to smile so I can check if his bottom teeth are still crooked, or if they’ve been Invisilined.

But he doesn’t really look like he’s in a smiling mood.

And I don’t know any good jokes. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Ex-husband. Ex-husband who? Ex-husband who I wish wasn’t at the same party as me.

See, doesn’t really work.

“You two probably want to catch up, and I just saw someone I want to speak to,” Gael says, slipping behind me and making his way to the blond woman. Which just lost him several points. Perhaps European men don’t know this, but you never
never
leave an American woman alone with her ex-husband that she’s awkwardly seeing for the first time in almost a year at a mutual friend’s party. Gael is supposed to stand there and remind Adam that I am desirable. I am wanted, even if he didn’t want me. Instead, Gael’s quick departure makes me feel even more ill-at-ease, as if someone has snatched my security blanket away. The blond woman laughs at something Gael says and touches his arm. Bitch.

“So, you’re dating someone,” Adam says.

I nod. I can’t really ask him the same question back without looking too interested. He seems to be at the party alone.

“How have you been?” I ask instead.

“Fine,” Adam tells me. “Taking some classes, and I’ve started running again. So you left the library?”

He’s normally a terrible liar, the sort who looks at the ground as he tells you that he didn’t eat the leftovers I brought home from the restaurant and told him specifically not to eat. But he asks this question as if he doesn’t know the answer, coolly looking me in the eye. Excellent—I’ve become a cook and writer since our divorce. Adam has perfected the art of deception.

I want to scream at him, “You know I left the library, because you lurk on my blog all the time. So you know that I can now fry an egg, and I’ve won an award, and I’m writing a book, and I’m terrified of baking, and I don’t want to go back to graphic design work. Just say it.”

Instead I give a small smile and take a sip of my beer. “I may go back. I just needed some time off to figure out things.”

“Can you wait here a second?” Adam asks me. “I just want to get a beer. I’ll be right back in a second.”

He slips into the kitchen, and I take this as an opportunity to disappear myself. I walk quickly and silently towards Laura’s hallway, where she is cleaning up empty cups, dumping them into a grocery bag that she is using for trash. Leave it to Laura to clean up during the party; everything in its place. She smiles brightly when she sees me.