“Excuse me? Your fiancé? Soooo . . . how long have we been divorced—and you’ve already got somebody else lined up?” He’s smiling. “What? Did you have a guy waiting in the wings or something?”
“Oh, Noah, stop it. It’s not like that at all. He’s my old boyfriend, and we’ve gotten back together and we have a lot in common, so . . . we recently decided to get married.”
“Your old boyfriend. Who might that be? Let me see if I remember the pantheon of guys.” He puts his finger on his chin, a pantomime of someone thinking. His eyes are bright with laughter. “Wait. I hope to God it’s not the one that ditched you before the senior prom!”
“No. Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“Oh my God! Is it the guy you ditched to go out with the hot guy? It is, isn’t it? You got back together with him?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I’m curious. Because I care about you. I did this terrible thing to you, and I’ve felt horribly guilty over it, so I’m glad to see you’re fine. That’s all. Also . . . I’m a little jealous, maybe. You got over things kind of . . . rápidamente, if you ask me.”
“I suppose you think I should still be pining for you.”
“It would have been nice to have at least a six-month pining period. I think for a two-year relationship a person should get six months of pining.”
“Ha!”
He’s gazing at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. I sip the beer he’s handed me, and then I say I’m going to see if Jessica’s around, and then he says that we never actually made it to that burger bar the other night, and why don’t we grab a bite to eat now, and the truth is, I’m a little bit hungry, and I can’t think of a good reason why not, and so we walk there. I keep meaning to ask him when exactly he might move out of the house now that he knows it’s not going to be his. Because surely that’s his plan. But the conversation is instead going all over the place—Whipple and Africa and playing music and what living in Brooklyn is really like—and I never quite get around to it.
Okay, I know this is shallow of me, but all my nerve endings and I had kind of forgotten what it’s like to be with a man who is so handsome that everyone stops and looks at him. It’s so unfair. Did separating from me and going to Africa have to actually improve his looks? And while we’re at it, at what age will looks cease to matter to me?
But, well, here we are—me and my nerves and him—and we’re laughing and talking, and he’s holding court, telling his magnificent stories and being the life of the party. And every now and then his eyes meet mine and he smiles, and I dig down into whatever sanity and strength I possess, and I say to myself, Not this time.
And when we walk home, with him smiling and taking my arm and laughing about the people in the bar and being as charming and engaging as Noah can ever be, I hold myself very tightly together. I let my footfalls tap out the rhythm as I walk: Not. This. Time. Not. This. Time.
And later, lying there alone in the dark, I resolve that tomorrow I will tell him he has to leave.
The next morning I wake up to a knock at my bedroom door.
“Please. Go away,” I say from the mound of pillows and covers.
“That is not a nice way to talk to a man who is bringing you breakfast.”
“Um, thank you anyway, but I don’t eat breakfast.”
“What? It’s the most important meal of the day,” he says. “And also I made my specialty—German pancakes.”
He pushes the door open. “Come on, I know you, and I am not buying the fact that you don’t want at least two bites of a perfect German pancake! Look at it!”
Making German pancakes was his specialty back when we were together. They’re thick wondrous concoctions with powdered sugar. Irresistible. Now he’s bringing them on a tray with coffee on the side. Bacon. A folded napkin. He’s a rich guy, the son of a woman who makes Welsh rarebit, so he has always been all about the presentation.
His face is flushed from all the effort he’s gone to.
“I thought you might like a reminder of happier times. That’s all. It’s just breakfast. If you really want me to, I’ll go away.”
“It’s okay,” I say grouchily.
“Scoot over. I’m joining you.” He stands there while I contemplate whether to move or not. Then he says, “If you don’t mind.”
So I haul myself over to the other side of the bed, and he sits down and puts the tray down between us. I tuck my feet under and arrange the covers around me. This is not good.
“Um, why are you doing this?” I ask him. The pancakes really are perfect—round and golden brown, with melted butter oozing across the top. And the bacon is how I like it—snappable. My stomach does a traitorously appreciative growl.
“Because this is my way of saying I’m sorry. I’m asking for pancake absolution. Aaaaand . . . well, I also want to ask a favor.”
“What?”
He grins at me. “Such a tone of voice! It’s just that I kind of need to stay here, so just hear me out, if you please. I promise I will be a good roommate, and I’ll behave myself and not throw wild parties. I’ll make pancakes and I’ll clean up. And fix faucet leaks. You know. That sort of thing. I’ll even put the toilet seat down ninety-five percent of the time, which is something I have never been successful at before.”
“No, Noah. That’s an absurd idea. We can’t live in the same house. It won’t work. You need to go.”
“But I don’t have anywhere to go,” he says. His eyes are twinkling, like he knows how to make himself adorable. “Come on, Marnie. We’re cool.”
“Call your family. Go back to Virginia and live with them, like I had to do with my family. Do whatever your people do when they run out of money, if that’s ever happened to any of them. But staying here is not an option. You know it won’t work.”
“I can’t call them. I really screwed up in Africa, and they’re pissed.” He starts stroking my arm.
I pull it away. “So teach. You have a teaching certificate.”
“I’m not licensed here. And I’m burned out. I don’t want to teach. Please, Marnie. I started some classes in September, and I intend to stay here while I finish them.”
I don’t say anything.
“Okay, hear me out. Look at it this way. This is a massive social experiment, okay? No, no. Don’t roll your eyes. Listen! We were good friends before we were lovers, and we were lovers for a while before we moved in together and decided to get married. And then I screwed up royally, bigger than I’ve ever screwed up in my whole life. And clearly, because of that screwup, we’re never going to be together together again. You’ve got somebody else now, and I respect that. So what if we just have this time in Brooklyn, in my great-aunt’s house? Just this little slice of time while you wait to inherit this place for real. We’ll be nice to each other. We’ll be friends again, repair all the holes in our relationship. And then—well, when we’re old and gray and decrepit and married a hundred years to other people, maybe we’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was such a cool thing we did, living together nicely even though we were divorced and had all that baggage.’ It can be like a spiritual practice—both of us here, in Blix’s house. I think she’d think this was really cool of us to do. Closure.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” I can’t look him in the eye. I go to the bathroom and pee, and then I stare at my reflection in the cracked, mottled, wavy bathroom mirror.
He calls through the door: “Did I mention that I’ll make pancakes? And I’m also throwing in the fact that I’ll kill all the spiders.”
“There are no spiders!” I call to him, but I have lost. I know I will say yes. I just wish I knew for sure why I’m saying yes. Is it to please him? Or to keep from being alone? Or is he right, that we really could bring some closure to our relationship?
And then I know for sure what it is.
I am not really done with him.
The place where he lives in my heart—well, he’s still in there. Still rattling around. And it was okay as long as I wasn’t seeing him. I had paved over so many emotions. And now I really, really do need to get over him.