The Theory of Opposites (16 page)

I push it all away and offer:

“I kind of have a lot going on right now. That’s all.”

“That’s all?”

I chew for a few seconds. “Okay. That’s not all.”

“But you got my email. On Facebook.”

“Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg’s wife made him sign a contract before she moved in with him?” I grab the little bottle of syrup and try to wrestle it open.

“I did,” he says.

“You did?” I say.

He reaches for the syrup and swivels it open, then hands it back to me. I dip the corner of waffle into the tiny mouth of the jar.

“I couldn’t even get my husband to let me visit him in Palo Alto, much less have him sign a contract.”

“Vanessa told me,” he says. “And I’m sorry.”

I stop chewing and stare at him. Theo was never that easy to read, mostly because he was so good at telling people what they wanted to hear, even if they didn’t realize they wanted to hear it.

“You don’t have to assess me,” he says, and I feel my ears burn. “I mean it — there’s no double-speak here. It’s a crappy thing he did. That’s not marriage, that’s not better or worse, thick or thin.”

I shrug.

“Don’t do that. Don’t shrug. It
is.
It’s a really terrible, selfish thing, to up and leave.”

(LIST OF SHAWN’S FAULTS #5: It turns out that he really is an asshole!)

Then Theo adds, less forcefully: “It’s why I ended my own engagement. I didn’t know if I could be there forever. I mean, I thought I could. And then I got sick. And everything changed. And I didn’t want to be the one to break that promise that I made to her.”

“I’m sorry you got sick.” I touch his knee. “I should have at least written to tell you how sorry I was for that.”

He bites the inside of his cheek. “I found myself wishing I could talk to you then, have you there to help me.”

“I don’t think I could have helped much.” I say, sliding my hand back to the safety of my side of the room.

“Why do you do that? Why do you say things like that?”

There’s no answer for this, so I say instead, “I don’t know how you handled it. The diagnosis. I don’t think I could have.”

“You handle it because you have to. And you could have. Everyone can. Everyone does. Life sucks sometimes, but you handle it. Don’t keep selling yourself down the river.”

I try to think of something to deflect the conversation from me and my shortcomings. Because that conversation could last a lifetime.

“How’d your fiancée take it?” I ask.

“The cancer?” he asks.

“Your broken engagement,” I say.

“Oh, less well than she took the cancer. So about as well as you’d think.”

“So…well?” I smile.

“Depends on your definition of ‘well,’” he says, grinning back. Then more seriously: “But it was the right thing to do. Ending it. Short-term happiness isn’t worth a long-term disaster. I…have an entire business model built on it.”

“I bet my dad would say that it was inevitable.”

“My breakup or you and me in a hotel room in Seattle after my breakup?”

“Theo…” But I have nothing else to add, so drop it. I rip a waffle in half and offer it to him. He takes it but doesn’t eat.

“So you got my email.” It’s a question phrased as a statement.

“You know I did,” I sigh. “Vanessa told you. I told you on the mountain that I did.”

“Should I not have sent it?”

“No…yes…I mean…”

“Because I’m usually pretty decent at reading the room.”

“So I read in
Time
magazine.”

“So you’re reading up on me in
Time
magazine?” He sinks back into the chair and splays his hands behind his head and winks, and I hate him (love him) because he is so goddamn irresistible. He always was.

“I have a subscription.”

“There is no chance you have a subscription,” he says, laughing. “Zero.”

So I laugh too because he’s right: I am not the type of woman who subscribes to
Time
magazine. I make a mental note to at least download the app later, once Theo has gone.

“I’m glad you wrote,” I say finally. “And I know I said it before, but Theo, it’s true: I’m sorry about the cancer. I…I should have tried to find the words to write you back.”

“Be sorry for my testicle,” he says. “Otherwise, I’m fine.”

“He was a good testicle,” I say.

“That he was. And I miss him dearly.”

“Ah well,” I shrug, my eyes bright.

“Sucks to be me,” he shrugs back, his eyes brighter.

“Oh please, your life rules.”

“Oh please, m’dear. My life can always be better.”

My phone vibrates on the duvet, breaking the spell.

“I should get that,” I say. “Family disaster.”

“With yours, it always is.”

17

That Theo and I broke up is entirely my fault. I don’t know if he would see it that way, but it’s true. Maybe “fault” isn’t the right way to phrase it. Relationships end. People fall away. That’s life. That’s, not to quote my dad or anything, inevitable. And so when Theo and I split, I did indeed chalk it up to inevitability, to the fact that fate must have had something else in store. And then when fate delivered Shawn, that was how I embraced what happened with Theo: he wasn’t here, Shawn was. It absolved any personal responsibility in the way that placing all your faith in the universe does.

But eventually, exes are supposed to make sense. You’re supposed to be able to see their name pop up in an old correspondence and think, “Oh my God, I’m so glad I dodged that bullet,” or “He’s not such a bad guy, but he wasn’t the right guy for me.” But I never really found that sense of logic with Theo. We were together, and then we weren’t anymore. And I could attribute all of that to inevitability as much as I wanted to, but when I was really being honest with myself, when my brain and memory and nostalgia compelled me to google him and wonder
What if?
... I knew that really, inevitability wasn’t the only explanation. I had ruined things, and it was as simple as that.

Shawn and Theo; Theo and Shawn. Is it possible to love two people at once? Vanessa has said, because we’ve discussed this ad nauseam, that she doesn’t believe that you can truly
love
two people at once, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have two great loves. She has had three, actually, and always managed to both break their hearts but still have them, in some weird way, covet her. She was still Facebook friends with them; she still slept with the second one (Ryan) every now and then when they both happened to be drunk at the same time (and he invariably texted her for days after the hook-up, hoping they could reconcile); and I always wondered if maybe, because they were all so kind and well-mannered and friendly post-split, this wasn’t actually love. That their feelings for Vanessa were something that they mistook for love, because how could you keep someone in your orbit when she was unwilling to move the earth for you to begin with?

But anyway.

Theo and I were together for three years before I blew it. The easy version of our breakup is that he asked me to move to Seattle, and I said no. But that’s the version you believe because if you remember what really happened, you wonder if you’ll ever forgive yourself for such a giant fuck-up. Isn’t it funny how that happens? The cognitive dissonance that time provides? My father built an entire multi-national conglomerate around this cognitive dissonance, though he’d claim that it’s just the opposite. That the Master Universe Way isn’t about reflecting on our past and trying to rationalize our choices and shortcomings, rather accepting those choices and rephrasing “shortcomings” as “life-comings.” I suppose that when I ruined things with Theo, I chalked it up to my own Master Universe Way: that what would be would be, and that if I screwed things up with Theo, well, you get what you deserve, as my dad would say. This was my own “life-coming,” though that didn’t really make me feel any better.

But my cognitive dissonance and my stupid Master Universe Way didn’t change the truth of what happened: the years and time that slide one memory into a different one don’t alter the honest events one bit.

About two years into dating, Theo decided that he wasn’t sure that he believed in marriage. It wasn’t a particularly revelatory announcement; he was an only child from parents who stayed together for “his best interest,” which of course, wasn’t his best interest at all. He channeled this loneliness into an incessant need to be sure that everything in life
added up
, and it was this obsessive need for order and logic that eventually made him such a success, turned him into the great mind of the future. He was, in many ways, the opposite of my father: rationality ruled, proof of something made it real. And though he had met my dad on occasion and had nodded politely when my dad marveled over the randomness and thus the inevitability of our meet-cute, Theo really thought that he was a quack.

But Theo wasn’t sure that marriage added up, and when he made this decision, he told me about it quickly, honestly, lovingly. We had just gotten home from Raina’s wedding to Jeremy at the Central Park Boathouse. It was a grand affair of 500 of my parents’ closest friends, with a big brass band and more tiger lily centerpieces than you could ever dream of. Though Raina doesn’t seem to remember it now, she looked so very, very happy. When the rabbi announced that Jeremy could kiss the bride, she literally jumped up, straddled him and knocked him to the ground. And when they emerged from their kiss, she held up her bouquet triumphantly and shouted, “I’m Raina Farley now!”

I had thought the wedding was pretty fun, as far as weddings go, but Theo evidently felt otherwise. And since Theo felt otherwise, I started to reconsider too. After all, Theo was a decision-maker, an expert at knowing exactly what to do. Whenever I was unsure about something (which was pretty much always), he would be sure for me. He urged me to accept my first job as a copywriter; he helped guide me away from a toxic college roommate; he encouraged me to be closer to Raina, to read more, to find one thing in life that I loved doing and do it. (I never got around to that.)

So when Theo and I sprawled on the couch after Raina’s wedding and he declared that he didn’t think marriage “added up,” I didn’t argue. He said that his parents stayed together out of obligation, not out of love. That he’s never been one to follow the straight and narrow, and so why should he now? That he loved me more than anyone he’d ever loved but he’d been round and round and run the figures and the facts and the economics (evidently there were economics of marriage), and a legal union didn’t “add up.”

I nodded my head while he rubbed my feet, and said, “I understand. I can totally see why marriage doesn’t add up.” What the hell did I know? Maybe it didn’t.

And then there was the opportunity in Seattle, and he wanted me to come. We were driving home from a weekend in Sag Harbor when he asked. And I loved him more than anyone, and yet, I immediately said no.

Even today, the same impulse rises up in my throat when I recall the memory.
No.
It sprang up quickly, unexpectedly, and I think neither of us knew how to react. It wasn’t as if I was known for my strident opinions.

He turned off the radio and swallowed my answer for twenty miles. I figured he was concocting his plan to get me to reconsider. He always had a plan to get anyone to reconsider. I eased my head into the headrest and let my hair fly against the breeze of the open window and waited for him to tell me why I had to reconsider.

Finally, he just said, simply, succinctly, without argument: “Why?”

And I said, much to my own surprise: “Because I believe in marriage.”

So he said: “But marriage doesn’t add up.”

And I didn’t answer because I didn’t have any reason to insist that marriage added up, at least to me. Not with my own parents as examples, not with anything sturdy to support me. And yet, still, some part of me believed that it was too soon to abandon the notion of happily ever after, the sort of happily ever after that came with vows and a three-tiered cake and the people most important to you as witnesses to your union.

He said: “Why didn’t you tell me you felt this way? Why wait until now?”

And I said: “I don’t know.” And then I paused and added: “But aren’t you going to figure out how to get me to say yes?”

But he shook his head, and there were tears in his eyes.

“Not this time. No, I am not.”

18

Email from: Willa Chandler-Golden

To: Minnie Chandler

Subject: Are you there?

Hi Mom,

No one has heard from you in a week since you went to Palm Beach. Are you okay? I know that Raina was in touch when Oliver was indicted, and she is grateful that you posted bail, but we are all a little concerned that no one has heard from you since. As you know, I’m in Seattle researching a book project (looks like dad might not be the only published author in the family!), and it is going…well. I think. I don’t really know. I just do what Vanessa says, which is weird things like go up to 20 strangers and tell them they look beautiful, or learn how to ride a mountain bike (I think I broke my pinky yesterday, but I’m okay — I put it in a splint I made with Q-tips), and she even forced me to hike up Mt. Rainier. Do you know Mt. Rainier? It’s hell. It’s hell on earth, Mom. It’s raining again today, so I had some time to email.

Anyway, please either get in touch with me or Raina to let us know that you haven’t set sail for Bali with a retired billionaire. If you have, please at least consider writing me into the will.

Also, before you ask, I haven’t spoken to Shawn, though I’m hoping to see Nicky soon. We lost our apartment, and all of our stuff is in storage, and I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for my life right now.

xoxo

Willa

PS — as you may know, Ollie is on house arrest and staying at Raina’s. If you are back in town, I’m sure she’d appreciate it if you stopped in and checked on him.

Email from: Minnie Chandler

To: Willa Chandler-Golden

Subject: Re: Are you there?

Hi darling William!

I am so sorry that I have been remiss in staying in touch for a week. This time away from your father and the family has been so nourishing for my soul, and while I provided Ollie with his bail money (a sentence every mother can only dream of typing!), I had a spiritual awakening three days ago. And that is this: I love my family like all get out, but I have had enough. This is my time, my darling! I am sixty-six, and I am going to enjoy my sunset years without getting dragged into the horseshit that this family always manages to step into! It is so liberating! Try it, darling: just say FUCK IT! Go on, try it! You have been so like me your whole life, and damn your father, I am certain that he would tell you that shouting FUCK IT to the world wouldn’t mean anything, wouldn’t change anything, but dammit, it feels wonderful!!!!