One Less Problem Without You (18 page)

The party didn't care too much about us, either, except for a few friends coming up to each of us and telling us to stop obsessing over each other and come hang out. Which of course fueled the mood of our conversation and kept us exactly where we were, on our own.

We outlasted everyone else, and fell asleep under the stars in a big sleeping bag he'd had in the back of his truck. He gave me his sweatshirt to wear, and we used my clothes and a raincoat from his truck as pillows. He put his arm around me and didn't try anything. To be honest, I had feared that moment of truth. I have grown so tired of explaining why my answer is no that it felt wonderful to simply not be asked. The only thing he did was kiss the spot behind my ear after he seemed to think that I had fallen asleep.

It made my heart tremble with excitement. It lit my muscles on fire. It electrified my skin. I knew I was feeling what people say you feel. I knew I was knowing what people always promise you'll
know
when you know.

I'm not sure if I know that he's the one—it's only been a few weeks by the time I write this—but I know for sure that I would be happy if that's what he ends up being to me.

I've been a bit afraid to see him after that. I fear that the magic will be gone. I fear that I have put him on a pedestal and set myself up for disappointment. I have been pedestaled before … I have been disappointing after being interesting to someone. I have felt like I wasn't “on” enough to delight someone else, and I don't want that to happen to either of us.

But it hasn't so far. Magically, though a little less poetic and dreamy, every interaction with him has been something special. It's only been a month and a half since I met him, and already I've done more with him and felt more than I have in my life with anyone romantically.

I've danced with him to Johnny Cash in his shitty dorm room while the reek of weed clouded around us from his roommates. I showed him my favorite old movie, and he laughed in all the right places. I sat on his lap at a bonfire, his sweatshirt hood up and my hood up, both of us vanishing into a world that was only our own until one of my friends threw a stick at us. Our friends get along. He thinks my girlfriends are funny, even when they are speaking only in inside jokes and high-pitched voices. My tire went flat and he showed up at 6:00
A.M.
to change it for me. We went out to a nice dinner, but both agreed that we had enjoyed the time we split twenty bucks worth of Chinese food on the floor in front of the TV just as much.

I fell asleep while he watched SportsCenter and felt like “such a girl” lying next to her very own “such a guy.” He fell asleep while I watched a romantic comedy. He has come over to my dorm and not missed a beat before kissing me on the cheek, even though I was in no makeup and hadn't washed my hair.

He is real.

He is good.

He is everything I never knew I wanted.

He has shown me that I have the capacity for this, and for that I owe him endlessly.

And tonight, he told me he loved me.

I was dressed up like a cat. A black bodysuit, little ears, black on the tip of my nose, whiskers drawn on my cheeks. He was dressed up like Indiana Jones. I like that he's the kind of guy that will wear a costume. I also super-like that he's the kind of guy that doesn't go embarrassingly over the top.

He's asleep next to me now, lying on his side in my tiny twin-sized bed, his arm draped over my abdomen. He's drunk, but not as drunk as any other guy on campus (it seems). We just had sex for the first time. He was good. He was giving. He made me feel sure about the choice to do it, and gave me explicit freedom to say no. He knows I'm writing in a diary, because he woke up a few minutes ago and said, “I didn't know you kept a journal.”

When I told him I didn't always, he gave me this sleepy half-smile and then squeezed my hip before falling back to sleep.

And now I feel a kind of contentedness I realize I never knew I was missing, but one which I always feared (on some level) that I would never reach.

I am in love, and whether it works out or not, I will never deny that I have fallen in love with Leif Tiesman.

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Diana

I was embarrassed about my first impression on Chelsea. My small mothering instinct told me it was wrong to make everything seem so hopeless to a girl who had the optimism to believe she could still get it right. On the one hand, they were adults in that room when I'd spilled my soul all over the place. But on the other hand, I didn't need to be another woman lamenting the lost illusion of love. Maybe I could find a way to say something less hopeless to her the next time I saw her.

Then, of course, I also didn't want to come off as such a loser. But bigger than all of that, I just barely had a relationship with my sister-in-law. (Soon to be
ex
-sister-in-law, I guess; what would she be then? Would she even be a friend? Or just someone who was relieved as hell to get rid of the dead weight of her brother's ex-wife?) When I called Prinny it was because I could
literally
not think of another person in the world to turn to, partly because the last place he would look for me would be with her.

It was like an emotional hangover. At the time, spilling my guts to them had felt easy and comfortable.
Good,
even. But by the time I got to think for way too long about it, I was sure I had talked too long, been too wordy, been too raw. Been too
much
all around.

As far as Leif was concerned, that would be the definition of me sleeping with the enemy. He had counted on me for years to coo and caw and agree with him that life was horrifically unfair to bring That Woman (Prinny's mother) into his charmed life, steal his father away, and then make that loss irretrievable with the introduction of the Little Princess.

That's how Leif usually referred to her, by the way. As the Little Princess. Obviously their dad
did
call her Princess until it was shortened to Prinny, but Leif could not bring himself to refer to her in any way that was even remotely affectionate, so he managed to make every little girl's dream title into an insult, dripping with loathing.

Now, I also remember a time in life when I longed for the title of Mrs. Leif Tiesman so desperately that, honestly, I could practically
taste
it. In fact, I think in some ways I
could
: It tasted of blood and sweat and dark, leaden, metallic desperation. I was so sure that it would make me happy forever. That, once it was
accomplished,
the hardest part of my life would be over and there'd be smooth sailing forevermore.

I could stop being Diana Warren, and I could become the one and only Diana Tiesman. Mrs. Tiesman. Mrs. Leif Tiesman. Picture it scribbled all over a composition book.

Anything I didn't like about Diana Warren could be completely rewritten in my new, married life. The second act of my life.

Instead, I killed my old self, and that New Me I wanted so badly is being slowly poisoned. Now I didn't even know who Diana was to begin with anymore.

The bitterest part of me wants to say,
And he managed to ruin that name, too,
but there's a grown-up inside me who knows that if I grant him the power to have ruined that name—
my name—
then I will never have the power to redeem it myself.

Okay, then, life itself took me by the hand, gave me a new name, a new idea of myself, and then challenged me until I reached the point where I had to make my own name and create a solid self instead of perceiving some
idea
of one.

And that's where I found myself very late on the night I hooked up with Prinny, saw the store, met the crazy actress I was to work with, and got the dented brass key to the space upstairs that she said “was once an apartment but might not have much in the way of habitability now.” Those are daunting words in a neighborhood as old and trashy and beautiful and dangerous and undeniably rat-filled as Georgetown.

All
cities are rat-filled. It's nothing against Georgetown, or the generous offer of a place that Prinny gave to me. I remember going to get a pedicure with my friend Crystal in Manhattan one evening, at a place so swanky and close to the New York Palace that even I probably could have hit a tennis ball from point A to point B. Good neighborhood, right? But just as I was relaxing into the massage chair while the manicurist did some magical reflexology on my feet, I watched Crystal's eyes dart left to right at some unseen (by me) object at the back wall; then her face went white.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Utterly unconvincing.

“What just happened?” I looked behind me but saw nothing. No thug with a gun, no guy in a trench coat with bare feet, no spooky ghost, nothing. “Why do you look like that?”

“I don't look like anything,” she said, still looking like she'd just been threatened with her life. The manicurist working on her nails filed down a little too close, and Crystal jumped.

“Oh, yeah, you're fine.”

She gave me an exasperated look and stage-whispered, “I just saw a…”

“You just saw what? A what?” I realize now that this was almost me asking
Why are you kicking me under the table?—
the kind of ham-fisted ignorance usually reserved for the dunderheads I dated, but we were in New York, as famous for its danger as for its glamour, and I didn't have time for her to be too
polite
to mention that my hair was about to catch on fire because the bright blue Macaroni and Cheese food truck outside the front window had just burst into flames.

“Rats,”
she hissed.

“Rats?” This time I looked down. I did not want rats underfoot, climbing up my legs and into my underwear.

Both manicurists carried on as if they hadn't understood a word Crystal had said, and for all I know they hadn't.

“
Three
of them.” Crystal pulled her hand back. “Boom boom boom, and then they just
flattened
”—she smacked her palms together in a way that still gives me chills to remember—“and went through that space in the wall behind you.”

A chill ran up my spine. Or was it a rat?

“Behind me?”

She nodded frantically and pointed, and now I saw that the cheap plaster wall—like the stuff elementary school ceilings were made of—was pushed in a little bit at the seam. Right behind me.

Right
behind me.

“Are they coming back?” I asked nonsensically. As if Crystal had suddenly turned into Jack Hannah, able to predict the behavior of wild, bubonic-plague-carrying animals.

“I don't know!”

It was the least relaxing pedicure I've ever had, possibly even more uncomfortable for me than for Crystal because the Imagined is often so much worse than the Reality (though, for the record, I've had various problems with both).

Since that time, I have stepped much more gingerly through city streets in general, and been grateful for my generous suburban home in Northern Virginia, where
critters
don't tend to be a problem.

So it was with a great deal of angst that I went to a big-box store and picked up every cleaning supply I could think of, as well as a rat trap I hated the idea of using but was determined to if there was evidence that I needed to.

I parked in the alleyway behind the store and used the back-door key Prinny had given me along with the apartment key. I didn't have a store key, though I would have preferred my first few steps in—and possibly my scampering steps out—to be through the pristine, beautiful storefront, rather than the cement stairwell that loomed darkly before me. Of course, beggars can't be choosers, and I was most definitely, at that point, a beggar.

And Prinny was a saint, because she didn't have any reason in the world to trust me or help me, particularly given how my husband had treated her.

I turned on the flashlight app on my phone and tried to remember, with every step up into the inevitable expanse of darkness, that this was a blessing.

It was.

It reminded me of those photos that showed up all over the Internet a couple of years ago of the Parisian apartment abandoned during World War II and discovered perfectly preserved and Gigi-esque lovely under a light coat of dust, but more complete, in a very compact way, than I had expected.

There was a large room, probably above the sales floor of the store below, with an old sofa (with cushion, so I was afraid what might be in there), flanked by two side tables with marble tops. A leather wingback chair that was probably worth a pretty penny sat in the corner with a matching ottoman. There was also one of those round dish chairs that Pier One sells, but the bamboo base was visibly broken, and even if it hadn't been, the cushion had probably been purchased by an acid fan at
least
two or three decades back.

That was it for furniture in that room. There was a nook of a kitchen off the back with a small built-in counter, but no stools. The two-burner electric stove would do fine if it worked; likewise the fridge, though I was sure that was going to be a big cleaning job. The bathroom, next to an unusually long, narrow closet that ran along the back wall, was just about what you would expect. Dirty linoleum floor, toilet too gross-looking even to puke into, and a shower/tub combination that I knew I'd never sit in no matter how clean I got it.

I began with the bathroom.

It wasn't half an hour into the task—worse than anticipated because sometimes what you think is just some calcium deposit in a toilet isn't—that I began to crave one of my newly invented energy teas, but given that it was 1:00
A.M.
, that was probably due to my overall exhaustion as much as to the daunting task before me, and if I had one now I wouldn't get an ounce of sleep even when I was finished. My drive to move forward, away from Leif, was stronger than ever, and the very thought propelled me on.