Once More With Feeling (15 page)

‘And so you married him,’ Brooke said after a moment,
in that same too calm, matter-of-fact way, like these were facts instead of opinions based on perceptions. ‘I had to stand up in a preppy dress that the old you would have mocked and wax rhapsodic about the beauty of your love and I’ll tell you, Sarah, I hope that one day you recognize that as the act of love and sacrifice it was.’ She let out a little laugh. ‘But then it all became about this fantasy you claimed you’d always had to move back to your home town and live there. And there was no telling you that this wasn’t a fantasy you’d ever had in all the years I’d known you. You said that things changed when a person got married – that I would understand it some day when I got married myself.’ Brooke spread her hands out in front of her, as if staring at her ringless fingers the way we’d done when we were girls fantasizing about our future husbands. Our Prince Charmings, who were never hanging around the East Village bars with the rest of the NYU students like we did, chugging down cheap pitchers of beer. ‘So I guess you could argue that I still don’t understand, that this is nothing more than the rantings of an embittered single lady that you and Tim can chuckle over when you get back together.’

‘That was when you and I stopped seeing much of each other,’ I said, hearing far too much in the rasp of my voice in the quiet room. Not at all sure what was happening inside me. ‘After the wedding.’

‘You didn’t want to see me, Sarah,’ Brooke said gently, with a wealth of old pain beneath it. At least seven years’
worth of pain, and I could feel every one of those years hanging on me like a weight. ‘You didn’t want any part of me. I was nothing but a bad memory of a life you wanted nothing to do with any more. I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t hear from you once you left New York. To be honest, I never thought I’d hear from you again. When I first saw you tonight, I thought I was seeing a ghost. I really did.’

That sat there between us, all of it, ugly and misshapen in the centre of the glass coffee table, plunked down on top of the latest issue of
The New Yorker
and several
New York
magazines. I stared at it, as if I could make sense of it that way. But I couldn’t. I knew she wasn’t lying, necessarily. She believed the story she was telling me. I just knew the other side of it. The real truth about Tim and me in those days, long before Carolyn had delivered that killing blow to what we’d been. It was like Brooke and I had seen the same movie, but she was now offering a different interpretation of it, and only I had read the script.

It was very hard not to say that.

‘I don’t understand why I would do any of those things,’ I said eventually. I thought back through all the things she’d said, and blinked back the dizziness and chaos that threatened to blind me – that were far too close to a fullblown panic attack for comfort. Or maybe that was just the tears I was trying not to shed. ‘Did you say I was depressed? Why was I so depressed that I would date some
guy I hated? And then go over all Stepford? Why would anyone do something like that?’

She really did laugh then, but stopped when she saw my face.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, sounding somewhere between astonished and scandalized. ‘You’re serious.’

She picked up her wine glass then and took a long, hard pull. Then she let out another laugh, but it was a shocked sort of sound. Like some kind of stark disbelief.

‘I’m serious,’ I agreed, feeling tentative, suddenly. Or
more
tentative. And definitely afraid this time – in addition to panicked, and a little too close to a fit of hyper-ventilation that would definitely not end well. ‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She shook her head, and then she put her wine down again, with another audible click, and smoothed her hands over her hair. She dropped them eventually, and then she sighed.

‘I’m talking about Alec Frasier,’ she said, and I could
see
him the moment she said it, like a storm roaring in, elemental and destructive. Unstoppable. ‘Dr Alec Frasier, whose name I promised I would never speak in your hearing again, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume we’re past that.’

I could see that Cape Cod picture I’d found in my closet and more than that, I could see his clever gaze on mine and that lean, fascinating face of his I could have stared at for days. And had. His thoughtful hands and that easy,
masculine grace he wore so carelessly. His rare smile, his surly impatience. His infectious laugh, his lone wolf tendency towards brooding. That impressive, formidable intellect of his that had often left me breathless with yearning. How had I ever forgotten him?

Because you had to
, some tiny, hidden voice whispered.
You had to forget about him or die. You had no choice
.

‘When he left it broke you,’ Brooke said softly. Kindly, as if she thought the words might break me. As if she knew they already had. ‘Wrecked you. I get why you refused to go with him and I think you were right, but you never, ever forgave yourself for it.’

I stared back at her, stricken, as memories I hadn’t allowed myself to touch in more than seven years poured back into me like a river. Like a flood. Making a mockery of my plans to conduct an emotionless deposition of my own life. Making me question why I’d thought any of this was a good idea in the first place.

‘You never forgave yourself,’ Brooke said again, a matching sort of misery in her own eyes as she looked back at me, as if, even now, after all this time, she still loved me enough that she would spare me this if she could, ‘and so I guess you decided it was easier to become somebody else. So you could stop trying.’

Later on, when we’d given up on restaurant ideas and had ordered a pizza instead, like one of our run-of-the-mill evenings in our tiny walk-up in Alphabet City, we tucked into the bottle of wine and pretended that all of that emotion, all of it repressed yet simmeringly obvious, hadn’t happened. Or hadn’t mattered.

Then again, maybe that was just me. The list of things I didn’t particularly want to think about seemed to grow longer by the day.

The familiar debate over whether to go out or order in, and then where to order from, seemed to take away the heaviness of our initial conversation. Or ease it, anyway. That was either a great relief or a terrible mistake, and I wasn’t at all sure which.

‘Tim did not make me a Stepford wife,’ I informed Brooke after the initial pizza frenzy had subsided and we’d shoved half the pie in our faces. I was half-lying on her couch, no longer all too terribly concerned about the wine glass
in my hand. I felt too full and slightly blurry, and I was sure that was what made me sound so much less defensive than I did in my head. ‘I’m the one who decided that he was the right guy for me, not the other way around. Just to be clear.’

Brooke cackled, that wicked little sound I hadn’t heard in too many years to count, and it made me inordinately happy – even if she was aiming it at me in this instance. She scraped her long hair back with one hand while she took a bite of her slice of now-cold pizza from the other.

‘Okay,’ she said. Ever so slightly patronizingly, I felt, though I was aware that I could easily be projecting all my left-over, repressed emotions into this moment. ‘If you say so.’

‘I really appreciate you telling me how you think all of that went down,’ I continued, choosing to ignore her tone. ‘How you saw it. And I appreciate you wearing that bridesmaid’s dress at my wedding. I do. But Tim is not some bastion of evil. You can’t hate him because he used to be a corporate lawyer and we used to be significantly more bohemian. Or whatever you want to call those years.’

‘Are you sure?’ Her tone was richly amused then. Her dark brows arched skyward. ‘I’m sure I remember that we made specific rules. There were to be no stuffy lawyers when you took that job. It was supposed to be about your student loans, not hooking up with The Man.’

‘The truth is that I totally misjudged Tim when I first met him, and so did you.’ I sat up a little bit, the better
to frown at her. ‘And weren’t you dating that tragic musician right around then? What was his name? Lloyd?’

‘Boyd, actually,’ she corrected me, with an air of great dignity somewhat marred by her smirk. She waved her half-eaten pizza slice in the air as punctuation. ‘And he was not a
musician
, Sarah. He was a
conceptual artist
whose
medium
happened to be
the architecture of sound
. God.’

‘If you want to talk about sleeping with the enemy, I think it all starts there,’ I argued, unable to wholly contain what I suspected was a matching smirk. ‘We made vows, Brooke. There were to be no more musicians past the quarter century mark and you were twenty-six. Twenty-seven? Whatever. You broke the rules before I did.’

‘These would all be fair and interesting points if this discussion was about the inevitable decline of my relationship with Boyd the so-called musician and his lame bicep tattoo of Joe Camel.’ She shuddered theatrically. ‘Thank God, it’s not.’

‘Maybe it should be,’ I said stubbornly. ‘I think it’s relevant.’

‘Boyd was irrelevant even as he happened, and completely forgettable almost before he disappeared into the mists of Bowery Bar, never to be heard from again,’ she said, still waving her slice of pizza around over the white box splayed open on the glass table in front of her. ‘He probably sells car insurance in some place like Poughkeepsie. No one’s cared about Boyd in years. Why don’t you tell me how we misjudged Tim?’

She took another huge bite of her pizza, and I paused to think again how great it felt to be with someone I had been so comfortable with for so long, so that it was so easy simply to snap back into the habit. Even with all the things I didn’t want to think or feel swirling around underneath. How good it felt to be with someone who could say
we
and make me wish there had never been such a big gap between us. There had been no debate over our pizza order, no polite compromising over toppings neither one of us loved but thought we could live with for the sake of harmony. There was no need.

Brooke had ordered the same pepperoni, garlic and black olive pizza we’d lived on way back when. Extra large. She didn’t even ask. And I loved every bite of it, no compromise necessary. Tim tended to be a little bit of a health nut who saved the pizza ordering for extremely special occasions, like maybe twice a year, and preferred a vegetable-heavy pizza that he could pick from and thereby pretend he was eating a salad. I’d missed the full assault of grease and garlic. I’d missed the tang of good New York City pepperoni and that perfect thin crust, crunchy and chewy at the same time, which was impossible to get quite right anywhere else. The fact that I was so full I wanted to die didn’t in any way prevent me from scooping up another slice.

‘He’s not the guy you thought he was,’ I told her. My tone was light, but I hadn’t forgotten our previous conversation. Much less the way it had hit me. But we’d moved
out of that particular space, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back there. Too much lurked there, just out of sight, which was right where I liked it. Even so, I felt sure I could clear up a few misconceptions without treading too far into that territory. ‘He’s really not.’

‘Then who is he?’ Brooke asked in that very nearly plummy voice that made me want to spill everything, even things I hadn’t told myself. I had a sudden vision of her in some leather editorial chair in her office, dispensing serenity to packs of excitable writer types in exactly the same tone of voice. She’d always had a version of it at her disposal, but I could recognize that the passing years had honed it, perfected it. Made it into something very much like a weapon. ‘You refused to talk about it back then. It was like you’d decided he was it and that was the end of it, no discussion allowed.’

She didn’t say that one of the reasons that had struck her so hard was because our lives until then had been one great shared discussion, with no end in sight. There was no detail too small or seemingly meaningless to keep to ourselves – no minor moment that we couldn’t obsess over and tear apart and dissect for days. It was our currency. More than that, it was how we talked our world into being around us as we moved through it. It was how we decided who we were. I understood exactly what I’d done by cutting that off. By amputating what we’d been – and I hadn’t asked Brooke or warned her that I wanted to do it, needed to do it; I’d just gone ahead and done it. There was a part
of me that still felt guilty about that, no matter how necessary I’d long since convinced myself it was.

‘He had a plan,’ I said at last, almost helplessly, trying to fit all of the things that I knew about Tim into a simple description that might help her see him, too. The way I had, even if that had gone bad all these years later. That didn’t change what he’d been to me then. I wouldn’t let it. I shrugged. ‘I wanted a plan.’

‘Oh, come on.’ She rolled her eyes, and God knew, she was good at rolling her eyes. She could say more with an artful eye roll than some people could say in whole, dense lectures. This particular one said a great deal, none of it complimentary about Tim. ‘I have a plan right now. I want to eat the rest of this pizza and then figure out the chocolate situation, and I will execute that plan. That doesn’t make me anything but a little obsessive and overinvolved with my food.’

‘I thought he was cute,’ I said then, around another huge bite of pizza. ‘I still think he’s cute. Yes, even now. I liked how he could make everyone in any room stop and listen to him, simply by talking about whatever he happened to be talking about. It’s like he was a little
more
than everybody around him. He had a spark, or something.’ I anticipated her expression more than saw it. ‘His eyes were
so blue
and when he looked at me, I really believed that he would love me forever. I really, truly believed it. And that, because he was Tim, and the particular kind of guy he was, he would take care of me forever, too.’

There were so many parts of him that I’d loved. That if I was honest, I still loved. It hadn’t all been turned off because I’d discovered the affair. It would be so much easier if it had been. And I missed those things, even now. Even here. His endearing meticulousness. His sense of order and how it should be imposed on the chaotic world around him. How strict he was with himself and his routines. What he ate, when he worked out. And the way that he could laugh at all those things, and admit that he was a little bit crazy, and he liked himself that way.
It’s what makes me a good lawyer
, he’d told me once.
I’ve never met a client as crazy as I think I am, which means I’m always three steps ahead
.