At three kilometers, I saw Jack.
Sort of. I had to stand up straight on my pedals and look down, down to the street, and I had to squint. Jack did not simply show up, I told myself. Jack did not materialize out of nowhere. Maybe, no joke, I was having a stroke. Maybe I was hallucinating. I slowed my pedaling and looked at the woman on my right. She had a Kindle open on the reading rack in front of her. She did not pay any attention to me, but I needed her to be there to make sure I was not seeing things.
I counted to three, then four, then ten, before looking back down.
For some reason, I thought of Mad Max. Absurdly. I thought of people appearing out of the desert, the heat waves obscuring their images for a time before their growing proximity rendered them knowable. That’s how Jack appeared. His image was not obscured by heat waves but by the everyday bustle of street traffic.
He had his eyes up on the building, watching. And he leaned against the most beautiful automobile I had ever seen: a tiny silver Mercedes convertible, its hood ornament so well polished that it glistened when the sun hit it right.
I got off the bike and stood next to the window and called him on my cell. I watched him click his phone and bring it close to his cheek. He smiled up at the building, but I didn’t think he could see me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “What the hell, Jack?”
“Hello to you, too, Heather.”
“Question unanswered.”
“I’m here to see you. I’m here to apologize.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“Constance told me.”
“You’re stalking me, Jack.”
“I’m not stalking you, Heather.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I leaned closer to the window in order to see him more clearly. I put my forehead against the glass of the window.
I hated him a little for finding a cute sports car in Germany. And I hate-loved how he looked leaning against the car, because it was just a little unfair to see his killer handsomeness beside a topless car, his hair mussed, a navy sweater with holes in the elbows keeping him warm.
“What do you want, Jack?”
“To see you.”
“What if I don’t want to see you?”
“Then you tell me you don’t want to see me, and I go away. It’s not complicated, Heather.”
“You were a complete jerk, you know?”
“Yes, I know. To make amends, I brought you this.”
He reached into the car and grabbed something from the passenger seat. I couldn’t make it out at first. Then gradually I realized what it was.
“Is that Ben and Jerry’s?” I asked.
“Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Your favorite. That’s what you said one time. See? I listened.”
“So you show up with a Mercedes and Ben and Jerry’s and you expect everything to be forgiven?”
“What I hoped is that you would know I’m trying.”
“Trying what?”
“Trying to say I don’t want us to be over.”
Finally, he spotted where I stood in the window. My father used to ask: Are you on the bus or not? Sometimes life came down to choices as simple as that. Are you on the Jack bus or not? The answer wasn’t in my iPhone, and it wasn’t anything I could study and then regurgitate on a test. It wasn’t anything I could manage by understanding trends or market analysis, arrange, set up, calculate, scribble on a pad of divided paper with pluses and minuses on either side.
Are you on the bus or not?
This was Jack. He would always be impetuous, always be a moving target, always be a surprise—delightful or otherwise. He would always make me wild and happy and thrilled, and he would always challenge me and hurt me in ways he probably wouldn’t understand. He would show up without warning, and he would occupy far more than his share of my mental space. He would hand me a sword and tell me to fight him to the death. But even as my mind raced around all these thoughts, another part of me realized one simple thing: our eyes hadn’t left one another for a moment.
I held up my finger to tell him I would be a minute. I hung up and turned around to wipe down my bike. The German woman surprised me with a single English word.
“Men,” she said and shook her head.
*
“I was wrong, you were right,” he said, coming around the car. “And I apologize.”
“What was I right about?”
“Is this a quiz?”
“Maybe it is. Maybe it needs to be for the moment.”
“I didn’t study. This is a pop quiz.”
“Hardly. See what you can do, anyway.”
He was too damn good looking. I felt my gut flutter. It annoyed me that my gut fluttered, but I couldn’t help it. He smiled. It was a smile similar to the one he had when he fenced with me.
“Okay, Heather. I’m admitting that I sometimes act insensitively. I’m saying that I was wrong to bring up this whole New-York-is-a-prison thing to someone who is about to move to New York. I was a clod. It was a stupid thing to say, and it landed badly.”
“Yes, you were a clod.”
*
A few people on the street veered around us. We formed the proverbial rock in the streambed. We forced water to go around us. One old lady wearing a black kerchief over her head and carrying a bouquet of asters nodded as she passed and then moved down the street.
Jack stepped closer to me. I felt the back of my neck flush crimson.
“We can drive this one hundred miles an hour on the autobahn,” he whispered, bending forward just enough so I could have his breath in my ear. “Have you ever gone a hundred miles an hour? You’ll feel it everywhere. You’ll feel it forever.”
Then he pulled back. I stared at him for a ten count at least. He still didn’t take his eyes off mine.
“First say you’re an asshat,” I said.
“You’re an asshat.”
“No, say you are an asshat.”
“Okay, you are an asshat.”
He smiled. I loved his smile.
He knew he had me. He held up the Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream again.
“It’s going to melt if we don’t eat it pretty soon,” he said. “That would be a tragedy.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I have a place in mind.”
“Where?”
“Give in to it, Heather. Trust me. You can trust me, you know.”
“Can I?”
“I could take that in two ways. Should you? Or are you capable of trusting me?”
“I like you, Jack, but that really sucked.”
“I know it did, and I’m sorry. I can’t say it won’t ever happen again, but I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I think maybe you did. That’s the part that scares me. That’s the part that hurt more than anything.”
He nodded.
I was crazy about him.
And I did the girl calculation. I didn’t like the way I looked. I didn’t have a toothbrush. I didn’t have a change of clothes, and I was sweaty.