Ari’s eyes flash with anger. “Says the person who hasn’t stepped foot in a kitchen for…a year?”
“What about me? Where do I fit into this?” He doesn’t bother to filter out the desperate edge to his voice. He waits for her to present some solution: long visits, weekends in Philly, phone sex. Could he go with her? It’s not like he has a reason to be in New York. He doesn’t have a reason to be anywhere.
She continues in the same suspiciously careful tone: “We can go back to the way things were. Over the phone. Before the…” Ari tilts her head and gives a little shrug.
“Before the what?” He waits for her to utter the word, knowing it’s not coming. “Say it.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Josh. You can keep dating. I’ll keep, you know, whatever—”
“We had sex.” God-fucking-dammit. “And I don’t want to go back, Ari. You’d rather be lonely together, over the fucking phone? Do you honestly think I want to hear about you doing ‘whatever’? Listen to yourself.” He feels his hands balling into fists and unfurling and balling again. “It unlocked something.”
“I’m not good at this part,” she insists. “It’s not personal.”
“?‘It’s not pers—’?” He looks up at the ceiling like he’s begging for divine intervention. “We’re not pretending this didn’t happen. Not this time. We already crossed that line, Ari. You can’t move it again.” Josh’s face turns from confused to mildly accusatory.
“You’re not listening to me.” It sounds like a warning, but she doesn’t get just how much he already understands her. “I’m not ready to unlock anything right now. I’m still grieving.”
“You’re ‘grieving’?” He grabs one of the shirts and throws it down onto the wood floor with a surprising amount of force. “She’s a narcissist who cheated on you and left. You’re letting this woman dictate your life and she doesn’t give a fuck about you anymore. I know it hurt your pride when she walked out. Because you’re the person who disappears in the middle of the night. You’re the one who leaves. Which is exactly what you’re trying to do right now.”
The look on her face is surprisingly wounded. “You already got the fun part. I don’t know what else you want from me.”
Josh gestures at the space between them. “This is supposed to be the fun part.”
“I’m having a great time, how about you?”
He leans closer to her, so that he can see her exact reaction to the words that are on the tip of his tongue. “I know what I want.” He has a heady, dizzying feeling like this is it. The last shot. “I want everything and I’ll give you everything.” He reaches out and brushes his hand over her hair. “You don’t just find that with someone and walk away.”
“We’re already fighting!” Her head moves back, away from his hand.
“I know there’s something here. I know it, Ari. I know you feel it, too.”
“Every bitterly divorced couple feels that way in the beginning. None of your problems matter because there’s someone to be your everything and take care of you. They’re the antidote to every little thing you hate about yourself. They can see past it when you can’t.” She shifts her whole body another inch away from him. “But eventually, you wake up and all the stuff you pushed down comes back up again. Every stupid, irritating thing about the other person becomes an argument. They get needy and demanding, they hide things from you—little things that your gut tells you are actually big things—and you start to feel paranoid and insane. You blame each other for all the ways that your lives aren’t working out. For all the decisions that made sense at the time but were fucking terrible in retrospect. And suddenly there isn’t any magic gluing the two of you together. You’re just two idiots arguing over who gets custody of the dinnerware.”
“I’m not going to take your bowl, Ari.”
“She paid thirty thousand dollars in lawyers’ fees to get rid of me. Do you get that?”
“That’s not you and me.”
She shakes her head. “But I know how this ends, too. Four years from now, I’ll run into you in the Whole Foods in Park Slope. You’ll be pushing your two-year-old around in one of those expensive strollers, looking for a perfect bunch of organic grapes, while your yoga instructor wife picks out kombucha. And I’ll be the girl wearing some random man’s Islanders jersey—”
“Islanders?”
“—double fisting bottles of cheap wine. I’ll be peeking around the corner, hoping you don’t see me and ask me how I’ve been. Because I’d have to tell you that I’m still pouring daiquiris at bar mitzvahs and writing speeches for strangers who actually have lives worth celebrating. That I still get drunk and go home with strangers I never see again. That I haven’t fixed any aspect of my life. I don’t want to go through that with you. I don’t want…” Her face scrunches up suddenly. “I don’t want to see you with a fucking wife and kid someday.”
Her chest heaves a little bit and tears start to stream down her cheeks. Josh looks away, moving his jaw, tensing against the impulse to allow his own eyes to well up.
“I’m so tired of crying in front of you!” she shouts. “I don’t do this. I’m not like this.”
It feels like some third person has pressed pause on the scene and Josh sees the whole thing like it’s playing out with two actors and he’s just some voyeuristic creep, watching an irate asshole yell at a woman who seems to close in on herself a little bit more with each volley. He waits until her crying jag subsides and she sniffles.
“How do you know we wouldn’t be buying organic grapes together in four years?” Ari’s expression changes, but not in a way that helps him decipher any kind of meaning. “I will buy you whatever fucking grapes you want. The kombucha.” He pauses. “The stroller. All of it.”
She looks exhausted. “I don’t want to get lost in someone else. I need to do something with my own life.”
It feels like a half-hearted tug-of-war; the harder he pulls on the rope, the more it frays.
“What the hell do you think my life is like?” He stands up again, needing the higher ground, pacing in a tight circle. “I’m a complete fucking failure. My dad worked himself to death for forty years keeping his business afloat for my sister and me. And I killed it in a matter of months. Every morning I wake up and remember that I failed him in every possible way and it’s too late to repair it. I have no job, no friends, and I make up a bunch of stupid bullshit to do until it’s time to go to sleep and do it all over again.” He stops pacing. “Do you realize the only thing I look forward to every fucking day is talking to you?”
“That’s exactly why this won’t work. You failed one time and you act like this pathetic victim of circumstance. Nothing’s stopping you from trying again except your own ego. No one exiled you. And I don’t want to be the only person you can talk to. I don’t want you to take care of me. I’m an adult.”
“Since when?” He should probably back the fuck off but everything’s gone a step too far to walk it back. “Seems to me that you’d rather be nipple piercings and bong vapor.”
Ari stares at him, eyes wide with a combination of anger and shock—like he’d just stabbed her in the stomach with a bayonet. He feels a momentary flair of regret but he can’t back down.
“I’m not waiting for more time to pass. I’ve wasted enough of my fucking life. I’m not going backward. You’re not going to insult me and pretend like we can just be friends again.”
He looks into her eyes until he sees the tears well up again, and she yanks the rope back.
“I don’t owe you a relationship just because we had sex.”