“Listen, I’ve got to take this,” I say, and he releases me with a groan and we go inside the apartment, and he heads upstairs to the kitchen.
“How are you?” I sit down on the floor and listen as she launches into a litany of complaints. Brian is working too hard; she’s lonely at home with the baby. She needs me there. Nobody keeps her company in the daytime. And she’s sorry but she feels betrayed by my decision to stay in Brooklyn, even for three months. It’s as though we’d reunited and worked out a wonderful plan for our lives, and then I went and changed everything. Backed out. And now she’s just heard from Jeremy that I even have a job here—and what is that about?
Listen, I want to say to her. I am . . . I am . . . falling again.
Noah comes back downstairs, with a plate of grapes and some cheese. He sits down next to me and starts peeling grapes and dangling them in front of my mouth very suggestively, which makes me laugh.
“This isn’t funny,” says Natalie. “You didn’t even tell me about the job! How come I have to hear it from him?”
Noah starts unbuckling my sandals and easing one off my foot. I’m having a little trouble breathing.
“I have to go,” I say to her. “I’ll call you back.”
And then—well, it’s as though we’ve gone mad, ripping off each other’s clothes and then making love right there on the rug in Blix’s living room, and it’s like no time has passed at all; he’s what I’ve been missing, his mouth and hands and his breath against my cheek, and I have about a million feelings because he’s so familiar and exciting, sexy and infuriating—but then, it’s over. And the second we’re finished, as he’s rolling off me, it slams into me that I’m the worst person ever. Jeremy’s face rises up before me, his eyes wide and hurt, and I hate that I have betrayed him.
But you know something? Even as I’m sitting up, grabbing my clothes in the cold air, feeling both guilty about Jeremy and disappointed in myself, there’s a big part of me that wants to block out all thoughts and live in this blinding light of a moment.
And so I do. I just do. Maybe making love with Noah is something that is bad but necessary. Maybe I’ll understand later what I’m doing. Maybe I can’t think about it now.
Noah stays in my room that night and the night after that and the night after that, and the moon outside the window shines on us, and cold air seeps through the cracks where the window sash doesn’t quite meet the frame, and branches scritch against the building like in a horror movie. These are the first really cold nights, and he puts his arms around me and we lie there each night after making love before sleep overtakes us, and I listen to him breathing and look at the little chip of the moon from my pillow.
There’s something that felt so inevitable about all of this, like he’s an old habit that won’t go away. I don’t ask myself if it’s love, or if I can trust him, or if this is the right thing to do, whole-life-wise. Because it’s not. God knows it’s not even close to being the right thing.
I feel awful. Here’s Jeremy in my head: You’re doing this to me again?
I close my eyes. During the day, I tell myself to stop. I tell myself that this is simply my need to resolve the past before I truly can accept my grown-up life with Jeremy. And maybe this is a little moment in time—closure, that’s it—and I’ll get Noah completely out of my system and I can move on.
The fact is, this is just a thing I’m doing right now.
I’m sleeping with my ex.
And like the job at Best Buds, like the house in Brooklyn, like the way the sun slants through the trees that are rapidly losing their leaves—it’s all only temporary.
A time out of time.
I may have forgotten to wonder what Noah’s motivation is.
And then one night when I’m nearly asleep, he asks me if he can see the letter Blix wrote to me—you know, just out of curiosity. I am suddenly wide-awake, on alert. Little prickles go off behind my eyes, like the beginning of a headache, and I say no. So that’s what he’s after—Blix’s letter? The thought that he may try to use it against me flits across the landscape of my mind.
“But why not?” he says. He’s propped up on one elbow, trailing his fingers down my arm, tickling me slightly. “I just want to read it. See what my great-aunt and my wife had in common.”
“No. It’s private. It was only to me. And please don’t forget that I’m your ex-wife.”
“But she was my great-aunt, and she didn’t leave me a letter. I feel like—well, I wish I’d gotten to know her better. I’m having a moment, that’s all.”
I sit up in the bed. Sleep has vanished.
He laughs, seeing my face. “Okay, forget it! Forget I even said anything. Go back to sleep.”
But of course I can’t. He closes his eyes, but I stare at him for so long that he finally opens his eyes and lets out a loud, exasperated sigh. “Marnie, for God’s sake. What’s with you? I merely asked if I could—”
“I know what you asked. But it’s intrusive. And disturbing. You want this house, don’t you? That’s what this is really about. You think if you read the letter, you can find out something that might mean I shouldn’t get the house. That’s what’s going on.” I put my face right down next to his, eyeball to eyeball.
He moves back, batting my hands away from him. “Stop it! I don’t know what you’re even talking about.”
“Yes, you do.”
He flops over on his back and puts his hands behind his head. “Okay, stop being a lunatic and I’ll tell you.” He takes a deep breath. “My parents are really perturbed about the way the will worked out. As you know. So my mom—it was my mom’s idea—she thought that as long as I’m here, one avenue we should check out is what Blix said to you in the letter. That’s all. She asked me to ask you if I could read it, you know, just to see.”
“One avenue? One avenue? See? I knew this wasn’t all aboveboard.”
He gets up on one elbow. “Well, what’s it to you, really? I mean, you’re going to sell this place. You don’t really care anything about it. And I’m not defending my mom because you know I am not one hundred percent in agreement with Wendy Spinnaker about anything, but she said to me that there’s at least a chance you’re not going to want to stay here the whole three months since you’re a Flah-ridian, so they should be on the watch for ways to keep the house from going to a charity. And she wondered if I might just ask you if I could see the letter. Okay?”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Right. Sure. I’m surprised she’s not rigging the place with booby traps to get me to move out.”
“Don’t give her any ideas. Now could we go back to sleep, please?”
I flop back down on my pillow and spend the next ten minutes tossing and turning.
Finally I say, “Noah, I think I need to sleep alone tonight.”
“Fine,” he says. He gets up and goes back to his own room, and I close the door behind him and lock it. Then I get the letter out of my purse and sit on the floor reading it again.
The letter, Blix’s voice, pulls at my heart.
I told you when we met that you are in line for a big, big life . . . Darling, this is your time.
I sit there for a moment trying to figure out why I feel so violated. Then I roll up the letter and hide it in the sleeve of my sweatshirt way at the back of my underwear drawer.
THIRTY-ONE
MARNIE
One morning later that week the doorbell rings at just past eight. Surely not more lobsters! I have the day off from the flower shop, so I’m still in my bathrobe, losing my daily fight with the coffee press thing, and Noah is choking down a piece of toast and reading the messages on his phone, getting ready to go to class. Of course we argue about who has to answer the front door. I say he should since he’s dressed; he says I should since he has to leave in a couple of minutes.