The Myth of You and Me (28 page)

“I doubt it,” he said.

My stomach twisted. “Why would you doubt it?”

He looked at me.

“You would doubt it,” I said slowly, “because you’re the one fucking her. Of course. How stupid of me.”

“I’m not,” he said. “Not anymore.”

I stood. I hardly knew what I was doing. I felt the chair wobble and right itself behind me. My eyes filled with tears. Show no weakness, I thought. I will kill you if you cry. A waitress passed by with a steaming plate of mussels. A man at the table next to ours ordered another bottle of wine. Talk and laughter swelled and receded, swelled again. For a moment Will and I stared at each other in a pocket of silence. Then he said, “Cameron. Please, let me explain. Please sit down.”

I turned and walked out of the restaurant, and when I reached the sidewalk I ran.

It took me
an hour to get back to Sonia’s on the train, and by then I thought I was sober enough to drive. I got on the Mass. Pike, headed west, and drove fast, like speed could erase what Will had told me. I felt like I was twenty-one again, racing back to Nashville from the gas station where I’d left Sonia, wanting her to cease to exist, wanting the moment when I hit the gas to be the end. It had seemed to me then that if I got back to Owen fast enough it’d be like I had never gone, and nothing Sonia had said would be true. Outside Owen’s house that day I’d sat in the car with both hands still on the wheel, staring out the windshield. The front door slammed and I turned to see Owen looking at the car as he walked down the steps. He approached cautiously, his hands out in front of him as if to show he was unarmed. I saw his face, the look of fear and guilt, and I knew Sonia had called to warn him. They were co-conspirators, unified against me, sharing secrets, sharing the memory of each other’s touch. I had driven back to him as fast as my car would go, but still I couldn’t outrun her. I turned to stare out the windshield again and, gripping the wheel so tightly it hurt, began to cry. Owen knocked on the window. He went around to the front of the car and put his hands flat on the windshield, begging me to open the door. His voice was muffled and meaningless. Didn’t he understand? He was just scenery outside the window. I was already gone.

Now I drove for an hour or so before I caught myself letting the car wander into the next lane. I was still tipsy. In a motel room in Sturbridge, Connecticut, I sat in the middle of the king-size bed and started to open the package. I had the yarn off and one flap pulled up when I stopped. I couldn’t do it, even though I hated Oliver for giving me this errand, for being so difficult to live with in the beginning, for making me love him and then leaving me. I put the package back together.

I was alone, and it was better that way, because this time I had chosen it. One way or another everybody left, and so life presented two options: You could be the one who got back on the road, or you could be the one left behind.

21

I
n the morning
I woke and lay there for a few minutes, waiting for the knowledge of where I was to come to me. In that instant before it did, I had the familiar feeling, both magical and terrifying, that I’d been transported into another life while I slept. When I realized where I was, I wished I had been. I was hung over in a motel room in some in-between town, neither where I’d been nor where I was going.

Outside I could hear the housekeeper’s cart trundling by. I imagined living a life where that was the first sound I heard every morning, where I ordered all my meals from room service and spent my days watching cable television, sometimes leaving to eat at a fast-food place or buy toiletries from a superstore. I could be anyplace in America. It mattered to no one, not even me, where I was.

I called Sonia to see if she was back. Her machine answered, and I said, “Pick up if you’re there,” and waited, listening to a faint whirring on the other end of the line. “Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll go to New York.” I waited again, but she still didn’t answer. “I don’t know what else to do,” I said, and then, embarrassed by how lost my voice sounded, I hung up.

When Sonia and I left Clovis for college, she was far more nervous than I. I’d lived enough places to make inhabiting the wider world seem not only possible but inevitable. Home was just a place where I happened to be. But Sonia had never been east of Dallas, west of the Grand Canyon, or north of Oklahoma City. She couldn’t be sure that everything she knew about herself was portable. Now I was the one feeling that the more places I went, the more of myself I left behind.

Back on the road, I turned south on 91 and went straight through Hartford to the Connecticut coast. Just past Bridgeport, I called information for Owen’s number and address. When I called him, his machine picked up, and at the familiar sound of his voice, I felt even more dislocated in time and space. “Hi,” I said, and then, because I didn’t know how to explain why I was calling, what I wanted, I hung up the phone. An hour later I was in Brooklyn, looking for a parking place on his street.

Owen’s apartment was above a deli. I stood outside for a few minutes, looking at his last name beneath the buzzer, and then I lost my nerve and walked up the block. I hadn’t been to New York in four years. I’d forgotten the feeling of being caught up in something that you could get just from walking down the street, all those people hustling with you and against you. It seemed to me you could walk the streets of New York and feel you’d lived an active life without ever doing anything at all. I moved like I was going somewhere, but the farther from Owen’s door I got, the more I thought about Will’s fingers tracing the lines of my ribcage, his warm breath against my skin, and then the time I saw him bend to place a kiss on the rise of Sonia’s breast.

I walked back, and when I was still some distance away I spotted Owen, standing on the corner outside the deli. He hadn’t seen me yet. He stood with both hands on his lower back, elbows splayed. It was the position he assumed when he was thinking hard about something. Suddenly he looked up and saw me. He did a double take, lifted a hand in greeting, and jogged toward me across the street.

His face had never been full, but it seemed to have lost a certain softness. Other than that he looked exactly the same. He was wearing a Paul Westerberg concert tee and a pair of jeans that were beginning to fray at the ankles. “Cameron?” he said. “Holy shit.”

“Hi,” I said.

Right there on the street he pulled me into a hug. He held me tight for a moment—I fought a surprising urge to cry—and then he stepped back and smiled. “What are you doing here?” he said.

“I’m looking for Sonia,” I said.

He looked puzzled. “Sonia?”

I nodded. Looking past him, I said, “Did you order a pizza?” A man was shifting a pizza box from one arm to the other to ring the buzzer at Owen’s door.

“Oh, shit, hang on,” Owen said, and ran, yelling, “Wait, wait!”

When I caught up with him he was standing there with the pizza box, grinning sheepishly. “I didn’t want him to wake the baby,” he said. “Did you know I had a baby?” When I nodded, he said, “I didn’t realize my whole world would revolve around getting him to sleep.” He studied me. “Wow,” he said. “Cameron. Do you want to come in?”

It was a small, sunny apartment—one bedroom, galley kitchen, bathroom, narrow living room, and a tiny alcove with floor-to-ceiling shelves of CDs. The living room was full of baby paraphernalia. Stuffed animals lined the mantelpiece. The baby himself, a tiny pink creature, was asleep in his carrier, nothing visible but his face and one balled-up hand.

Owen’s wife was named Anna. She was a pixie of a woman, with a small frame and a sprightly air. She wore her fine blond hair cut short, and I could have sworn her ears were slightly pointed. When Owen introduced us, she hugged me. I patted her gently on the back, feeling like a giant who’d been handed a piece of delicate china.

After I’d admired the apartment and the baby, Anna asked what I was doing in New York, and I repeated that I was looking for Sonia. They hadn’t seen her lately, though she’d stayed a night with them a couple months ago. I told the story about the package and summarized my search for her, though I lied about why I’d thought she might be there. I said I’d seen the birth announcement and surmised she’d come to see the baby. I wondered how much Anna knew about Sonia and about why Owen had broken up with me. Or rather, why I had broken up with him. I supposed I had been the one to end our relationship. Funny how I tended to think of it the other way around. If Owen had told her, he must have offered some explanation, to assure her that nothing of the kind would ever happen to her. I wondered if that explanation had been “I was young, I was drunk,” or if it had been something better, something that would be worth hearing now.

Anna and I sat on the futon while Owen fetched glasses of water from the kitchen. I admired the baby again. “He looks just like Owen, don’t you think?” Anna said, and I agreed that he did, although it was hard to tell. When Owen appeared, handing us our glasses and then sitting on the other side of Anna—there was no other place to sit in the small room—Anna smiled at him and patted his thigh. She left her hand there as she said, “I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been telling Owen for a long time he should track you down. He still feels guilty about what he did to you.”

I flushed, and glancing at Owen I saw that he had flushed, too. That answered the question of whether he’d told her. “Anna,” he said.

“What?” She made a guilty face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have an honesty defect.”

“It’s okay.” I couldn’t decide whether to be affronted or amused.

“Owen wishes he could put a filter in me.” She smiled. “But,” she added in a teasing tone, “it’s what he loves about me, too.” She turned to him. “Admit it!”

He gave her a mock frown, shaking his head, his cheeks still pink. “I admit nothing,” he said.

“I’m really sorry.” She held up her hands. “Let’s blame the hormones. Or the sleep deprivation! Let’s blame that.”

“It’s okay.” I caught Owen’s eye and looked away. “It’s really okay. It was a long time ago. Let’s talk about the baby.”

“You might be sorry,” Anna said. “I can talk about the baby a long time.”

The baby’s name was Emmet. He was five weeks old that day. He’d been colicky, but now he was sleeping more and more, to Anna’s great relief. Anna coordinated educational programs for a museum, but was on maternity leave for another two months. Owen was a music publicist. He listed some of his clients, and I was impressed—I’d heard of several of them. They’d been married for three years. They’d met at a wedding—one of Owen’s co-workers had married Anna’s best friend. I asked question after question, hoping to distract them from asking any of me. In the back of my mind I heard Anna saying, “He still feels guilty about what he did to you.” Watching Anna’s mobile features as she talked, I wondered how any man who’d once loved me had ended up with this sweet, open person who seemed incapable of lying. I had always assumed some common thread connected all the people you chose to love, but if there was one between me and Anna I had no idea what it was.

Emmet woke and started screaming. It had been some time since I’d heard a newborn cry. I’d forgotten how desperate you became to give him what he wanted. It wasn’t time for him to eat, but after bouncing him and trying all manner of toys, Anna sighed and said she’d better nurse him. “Take Cameron out for a beer,” she said. “Then you guys can talk.” Owen gave her a look, and she turned to me. “I’m sorry,” she said over Emmet’s cries. “I just can’t help myself.”

We went to a bar across the street, a dark pub-style place with a pool table and no one but the bartender inside. We made awkward chitchat, Anna’s comments still in the air between us as we sat down with our beers. “I can’t believe you’re a father,” I said.

“Me neither,” he said. “It’s weird, though. Anna seems like a mother now, and she didn’t before.”

“She wasn’t before.”

He laughed. “True.”

“I guess we’re grown-ups.”

“More or less,” he said. He clinked his beer against mine.

Halfway into the second beer, I said that Anna and I seemed very different.

“In appearance, maybe,” he said, like he’d already given the matter some thought. “But you’re both romantics. You think that everything is connected somehow. You think everything means something.”

“I’m not a romantic.” Irritated, I mopped at the wet circles my beer had left on the table.