At one point, after we had delved into a few personal matters, including my Ph.D. program and his residency, he nodded down at my diamond ring and said, “So when’s the big day?”
I told him twenty-nine days, and I must have looked grim when I said it, because he gave me a knowing look and asked if I was okay. It was as if he could see straight through me, into my heart, and as I looked back at him, I couldn’t stop myself from welling up. I couldn’t believe I was crying with a complete stranger when I hadn’t even broken down on Cheryl’s tweed couch. “I know,” he said gently.
I asked how he knew.
“I’ve been there,” he said. “Of course, I wasn’t on my way to the altar. But still. . .”
I laughed through an unattractive sob.
“Maybe it will be okay,” he said, looking away, as if to give me privacy.
“Maybe,” I said, finding a Kleenex in my purse and gathering myself.
A moment later, we were stepping off the train at 116th Street (which I would only later learn wasn’t Nick’s true destination), the crowd dispersing around us. I remember how hot it was, the smell of roasted peanuts, the sound of a soprano folksinger crooning from the street above. Time seemed to stand still as I watched him remove a pen from the pocket of his scrubs and write his name and number on a card I still have in my wallet today.
“Here,” he said, pressing it into my palm.
I glanced down at his name, thinking that he looked like a Nicholas Russo. Deliciously solid. Sexy. Too good to be true.
I tried it out, saying, “Thank you, Nicholas Russo.”
“Nick,” he said. “And you are ... ?”
“Tessa,” I said, feeling weak with attraction.
“So. Tessa. Give me a call if you ever want to talk,” he said. “You know. . . Sometimes it helps to talk to someone who’s not. . . vested.”
I looked into his eyes and could see the truth. He was as vested as I was.
***
The next day I told Ryan I couldn’t marry him. It was the worst day of my life to that point. I had had my heart broken once before him—granted, on a much more adolescent level—but this was so much worse. This was heartbreak plus remorse and guilt and even shame over the scandal of calling off a wedding.
“Why?” he asked through tears I still can’t bear to think about too closely. I had seen Ryan cry before, but never because of me.
As hard as it was, I felt that I owed him the truth, brutal though it was.
“I love you, Ryan. But I’m not in love with you. And I can’t marry someone I’m not in love with,” I said, knowing that it sounded like a canned breakup line. Like the sort of unsubstantial, shallow excuse middle-aged men give before divorcing their wives.
“How do you know?” Ryan asked. “What does that even mean?
I could only shake my head and think of that moment on the train, with the stranger named Nick in the blue-gray scrubs, and say again and again that I was sorry.
Cate was the only one who got the full story. The only one who knows the truth, even today. That I met Nick before I broke up with Ryan. That if it weren’t for Nick, I would ve married Ryan. That I’d probably still be married to Ryan, living in a different city with different children and a different life altogether. A watered-down, anemic version of my life now. All the same downsides of motherhood, none of the upsides of true love.
Of course, there was speculation about infidelity among some of our more partisan friends when Nick and I started to seriously date only a few months later. Even Ryan (who at the time still knew me better than anyone, Nick included) expressed doubts about the timing of things, how quickly I had moved on.
“I want to believe you are a good person,” he wrote in a letter I still have somewhere. “I want to believe that you were honest with me and would never cheat. But I have a hard time not wondering when you and your new boyfriend actually met.”
I wrote him back, despite the fact that he told me not to, declaring my innocence, apologizing once again for the pain I caused him. I told him that he would always have a special place in my heart, and that I hoped, in time, he would forgive me and find someone who loved him the way he deserved to be loved. The implication was clear—I had found what I wanted for him. I was in love with Nick.
It is a feeling that has never wavered. Life isn’t always fun, and is almost never easy, I think, as I return to the kitchen in my troubleshooting mode, ready for my second cup of coffee, but I am in love with my husband and he is in love with me. It is the constant in my life, and will continue to be so, as our children grow, my career changes, friends come and go. I am sure of this.
But I still find myself reaching out and knocking twice on our wooden cutting board. Because you can never be too sure when it comes to the things that matter most.
4
Valerie