I caught Michelle’s eye just for an instant as I sat down. She mouthed, “Thank you,” at me, and I closed my eyes and nodded, tears welling in my eyes, but I didn’t go to her. I turned back to Ellen, plastered the smile back on my face, and waited for it to be time to go home.
* * *
• • •
When it was finally late enough that the lights dimmed and everyone in the ballroom seemed whiskey-drunk, I grabbed my mom from the back corner table and asked if she was ready to leave.
“Baby, I was ready two hours ago,” she told me. “Actually, I was ready to go back when I first found out I wasn’t getting a plus-one.”
“Thank God.” I linked my arm with hers tipsily. “Me, too.”
“Leaving already?” Darcy hissed, catching me by the elbow just before we made it to the door. “My goodness, you must be exhausted with everything you did putting the wedding together. And you were so quiet, we barely even noticed you helping at all!”
“Actually,” I said in a syrupy tone to match hers. “The only thing I’m tired of is spending time with you. Which, now that this wedding is over, I just realized I never have to do again. Have a great night!”
I walked away quickly, hauling my mom behind me by the elbow as she tried and failed to contain her sputtering laughter. I snuck one glance back at Darcy, and she was still standing there in the hallway with her mouth open.
The country roads lay quiet and dark ahead of us as we started for home. Michelle and I never got lost on our drives back in high school, not even on the darkest, unmarked dirt roads when we drove for miles late at night. Now I had no idea where we were.
“Can’t believe I have to be our eyes on the road tonight.” My mom sighed, shaking her head. “If only Marcia had just let me bring Jeff, because I had to talk to Daryl and Renée Palmer while I was sober, and believe me, that is a tall order for anyone. As I’m guessing you know based on what you said to Darcy Palmer on our way out.”
I cocked my head and looked at her. “It’s funny. Every once in a while, you sound exactly like me.”
She laughed. “No, baby, sometimes you sound exactly like me.”
“Wait, Jeff’s still in the picture?”
“Well now, that’s a long story. I hope so. I think that if I just—”
“Mom, wait. I have to tell you something.”
She raised an eyebrow at me, just visible in the dark. “Is it about why you wanted to leave the wedding so early? I know something’s not right.”
“Michelle and I had . . . a fight,” I admitted, halfway impressed that she had actually noticed. “But it’s not that. I thought you should know that Mark and I broke up. That’s why he didn’t come with me to the wedding.”
I heard her sigh, and then she was silent. The car bumped and lurched over the grooves of the potholed road. She reached an arm awkwardly across the car cup holders to squeeze my hand. “Oh, Julie. That’s terrible. Are you okay?”
“I am. I mean, I sort of broke up with him.”
Silence again. This was a cardinal sin in her rulebook, breaking up with an acceptable man, at least so far as I could ever tell.
“It just wasn’t working, for a lot of reasons I don’t want to go into,” I continued. “But you seemed so interested in him, so, you know, sorry.”
“Julia,” she said sternly. My given name, all three syllables strongly pronounced, which she hadn’t used since I didn’t know when. “You know I want you to find someone to be happy with, and God knows I want you to do better at it than I’ve done, but if you really don’t love Mark, then the hell with him, and that’s how I feel. In fact—”
“Seriously?”
“Of course,” she said, like it was silly that I was surprised. “It’s what you want that matters.”
“I’m going to remind you that you said that when you start asking me if I’ve found a boyfriend again. You used to ask me every time I came home from Cornell.”
She swatted at me. “Oh, stop it. Now we can share dating stories! I’m allowed to ask.”
“You are. I just want you to understand that I might be happier on my own. For a long time. What would you say to that?”
We hit a stoplight, but she kept staring ahead at the road with a faraway look in her eyes. “I’d say I don’t really understand anything about that,” she said finally. “But then you don’t know what it was like trying to find someone to help take care of us. Of you. You don’t know the half of what it was like to try to raise you without your dad—I know you think I made a lot of mistakes—or what it’s been like to be here without you, alone, so I’d say fair play to both of us. I’d say I guess I want you to be happy.”
I almost challenged this. I almost asked, “With the time you spent looking for someone to take care of us, couldn’t you have taken care of us?” But I didn’t. There were so many pieces of her life I could never know. Not everything made sense to me, but suddenly I understood, in a new way at last, how much different the world she had been raised in was from mine. It could be my choice to live differently. To be the person who comes to save myself.
“I want you to be happy, too,” I said. “I do.”
We drove on for about thirty seconds in silent contemplation of the understanding that had just passed between us. And then we were back to normal.
“Now, anyway, let me tell you about what Mindy and I did for Eleanor’s fiftieth birthday last week,” my mom began. “Really, get ready, you’ve never heard anything like it.”
CHAPTER 27
The fun part of arriving back in New York after the wedding was secretly looking up apartment rentals on StreetEasy while I was at work. The less fun part was the need to retrieve the last of the belongings I’d left at Mark’s apartment over the last two years.
We kept in touch via curt texts over the month that included the anxious days of the procedure and the even more awkward days around the wedding. I had wanted to keep him up-to-date, at least. It felt strange that he wasn’t there. I had spent most of Michelle’s engagement thinking that he would be, imagining us dancing at the reception or locking eyes over one of Darcy’s more ridiculous comments. We had remained mostly civil, but every time I looked at my phone and saw his name I felt my heart folding in on itself, like something in collapse. It wasn’t a feeling of regret, but I couldn’t remember a type of sadness that had felt so simply deflated.
I went over to see him after work on a Wednesday, making the long walk from Astor Place down East Sixth Street because I knew I’d have to spring for a cab on the way back. I knew I could move a couple boxes of my clothes and books in a car, but the emotional weight was something else.
Mark opened the door on my first knock, and apart from being unshaven he looked the same. It had been only weeks since I’d seen him, but I had wondered if our breakup would somehow transform him into a stranger. It surprised me how glad I felt to see him. Intimacy rubs strange grooves into you; the roads of connection are smoothed and worn by gestures and intonations repeated over and over—erosion by force of habit. Seeing Mark’s sad smile, knowing the particular blend of pain and disappointment and resentment behind it, awoke our very particular connection in me. Long after I had ceased to miss him, I would miss the specific way in which we had known each other. No one else would ever traverse the exact same path to my heart.
“Thanks for making the time to be here,” I said in the awkward, slightly formal parlance that was now the language we used to talk to each other.
“Yeah, well. I have most of your stuff in that box there. Look around for anything else.”
I walked into the apartment, observing the gleaming countertops, the spotless floors, the lack of plants or flowers or anything living. It was Mark stripped down to who he would be alone. Somehow it made things easier.
I did a quick sweep of the bedroom and grabbed the one photo of the two of us I had ever f
ramed, the one taken by the bartender the night I came home from Dublin. I tucked it away furtively. I wasn’t sure either of us deserved to have it, but from a place beyond logic, I wanted it. I didn’t want to forget him. Us.
Mark appeared in the doorway behind me then, leaning against the frame. “Do you remember when we took that trip to Vermont for the weekend?” he asked quietly, mournfully. “That first time we went away together?”
A wave of sadness rose in me momentarily and then subsided. The thing about memories: How you remember them and how they actually happened are usually different. And so the way you remember becomes the memory itself, taking on a life that the truth of it never could.
“I do,” I told him. “That was a great trip.” That was only half of the truth, though, from my side. The hiking was great, but Mark had invited along two of his high school friends to camp with us, and after the first night he spent far more time talking to them than to me, comparing consulting with finance and Wharton with Harvard.
Mark wasn’t a bad person, not at all. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been just a little wrong all along.
I moved past him, closing the box in the living room and picking it up with a significant effort. “Before I leave,” I said with a hesitant, sad smile, “is it too cliché to say that I’m sorry? And that I know you’re going to meet someone way better for you?”
“Yes,” he answered. “Too cliché and way too soon.” He kept his mouth in a straight line at first, but right before I turned to leave, I saw a slight crinkle around the eyes, the hint of a smirk at the side of his mouth.
He shook his head and sighed. “I hope you find whatever it is you’re really looking for, Jules.”
“You, too,” I said.
It wasn’t happiness, exactly, but I could only hope that it would make a start.
* * *
• • •
The next day at work, Alan popped into my cubicle to hear about how the final move out had gone. He held up two Diet Cokes from the break-room vending machine in a celebratory way, like they were bottles of champagne.
“We’re celebrating, bitch,” he announced as he sat down next to me at my desk.
“That . . . my ex-boyfriend didn’t burn all of my stuff after we broke up and I had an abortion?”
“Dark. No, that you’re getting a new apartment. And, more importantly than all that, that I’m working on editing something I love. Gossip Girl meets murder mystery—think Elite in novel form. Finally something that’s up my alley.”
“But your work on the Fresh Blood series was—what did Howard say, ‘Truly inspired’?”
Alan groaned. “Am I never to live that down? Anyway, shut up and dish with me. And drink some soda. We are also celebrating that I finally figured out how to tip the vending machine and get these babies for free.”
I watched Alan as he took a sip. He had ditched the hipster horn-rimmed glasses, switching to a more subdued pair of black frames, acquired on his most recent Warby Parker trip. Underneath, I saw the lines crinkle at the corners of his eyes as he flashed me a smile; he looked older, but in a good way. It was hard to believe we had been working side by side for almost four years.
“You know, maybe you really should quit and work in tech and start an app instead of talking about it,” I teased him. “I hear they even give you meals for free. No vending-machine tipping necessary.”
“Maybe I’ll start looking for something,” he said, a far-off look in his eyes that was more serious than any expression I’d ever seen him make at work. “But we’ll see. I do love publishing, too. I’d better; nobody goes into it for the money.”
“Ha. Yeah, I love it, too, but I probably should’ve stuck with the business degree. Or the—”
“We get it, you had a lot of majors,” he teased. “Now, tell me about the new apartment.”
It wasn’t definite yet, but I had finally decided that morning to put in an application on an apartment in Kensington, deep in South Brooklyn. The place wasn’t much. To fit my budget, I was looking at walk-up studios with barely serviceable “kitchenettes.” But I had never had a place of my own, and every apartment that didn’t come with more Craigslist roommates looked like a palace, I told Alan.
And then he asked me about Michelle.
“The wedding is over,” he said. “You survived.”
“I did. Barely, at points, but yes.”
“So, does that mean that’s it? Are you guys really just never going to see each other again?”
I shot him a pointed look. “Would you be friends with her after what happened?”
Alan sipped his Coke. “I’m not saying what she said wasn’t horrible,” he said in a measured tone. “You have every right to tell her to fuck off from now until eternity. Believe me, I’ve had some pretty unforgiveable stuff said to me under the pretext of ‘values.’” He shrugged. “But when you first started working here, all I ever heard was Michelle this, Michelle that. All those inside jokes and stories I never got. I guess I’m just trying to say, I wish I had a friend that had known me my whole life.”
“I know what you mean,” I told him, but it was so much more complicated than just the day of the fight on the phone. Michelle and I had existed in relation to each other in a certain way for almost our entire lives. If she was the sun, then I was the planet, my whole path determined by her gravity. As two separate entities, could we have anything in common ever again?
And still, in spite of all that, I knew exactly what Alan was saying; I had been thinking about it, too. I thought about it when I lay awake next to Dana at night after the procedure, at home with a friend who was so much like me—someone I wanted in my life forever—and yet a part of me still missed Michelle. The history, the way she had felt more like family than most of my real family. As the heat of my anger subtly died down, I caught myself trying to figure out if maybe we could be worth fixing. As different as we were.
“Look, I know you and Michelle are different. Like, uh, really different. And she was awful about what you went through. But I’m willing to bet that you said some not-great things, too. And it’s just whether or not you can accept the flaws in her. I would know,” he added, alluding to his decision to try to mend his relationship with his grandparents after what had happened between them a year and a half ago: They had uninvited him from family Christmas when he made his relationship with Marcus public. It had broken my heart, so I could only imagine how he felt.
“Yeah, I . . . said some things, too,” I admitted. Then I looked him in the eyes and smiled. “To love someone without the hope of changing them is the only way you can love them.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. Just that I finally knew what I wanted to write.
* * *
• • •
Two weeks later, I submitted my first essay to the Times Modern Love section from the very café where I had broken down and told Alan I was pregnant. It made for a good kind of poetic symmetry, I decided. Also, the café made great lattes.
I sent the e-mail off to the editor—essay text in the body, no attachments—and waited to feel like I had accomplished something big. I checked Facebook and scrolled through my news feed as I finished off my coffee. Darcy had entered her third trimester, posting that pregnancy was “exhausting but so totally worth it!” A college acquaintance announced that she had been accepted to Harvard Business School.
I imagined hypothetical status updates that I could post. “So excited to tell you all that I finished an essay about my former best friend who I don’t know if I even want to talk to anymore!” Or “I’m turning twenty-six in a month, and is that still your midtwenties or am I now in my late twenties? Please help.” Or “I’m signing a lease on an apartment that even my mom—who once lived in a van following the Grateful Dead for six months—thinks is too small.”
I clicked out of the page. As us
ual, social media silence was probably the best strategy.
I walked out onto the street without any real destination in mind. It was a quiet Sunday, but in the good way. Two years before, I probably would’ve been heading to a boozy brunch with Dana and Ritchie. We still went to brunch, but more like once every few months than once a week. Honestly, it was kind of a relief. Sunday evenings were a little bit less depressing without a mimosa hangover coming on.
I thought about Alan and Marcus, who were probably walking their dog down the picturesque Brooklyn Heights waterfront. I thought about Ritchie, spending the weekend with her parents at their New Jersey shore house. And I thought about Michelle, recently returned from her honeymoon with Jake in Turks and Caicos. After seeing the Instagram pictures, which both made me angry and hurt my heart a little bit too much, I had hidden her from my feed.
Instead of trying to text any of them, though, I changed direction and started walking a little bit faster, heading toward the Strand Book Store. The early spring sun shone warmly on my face, and it felt like a luxury that I didn’t have anywhere in the world that I had to be. As I walked, I pulled out my phone and opened my e-mail to read what I had written one more time.
When Your Greatest Romance Is a Friendship
I was the one who said “I love you” first.
Here’s how it happened: We had gone to get soft-serve cones—twists, like always—at the Tastee-Freez in our hometown on a sweltering Alabama afternoon, in the kind of humidity that feels like you’re wearing it like a scarf. We took the first freezing-cold bites of our cones at the same time. I watched Michelle close her eyes as she swallowed. When she opened them again, she shot me her trademark mischievous grin.
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