Once in a Lifetime

by Bliss, Harper

  “Either you make the commitment and move in or you don’t and… this is over.” Amy shuffles nervously in her seat. Where are the tears? The despair? Shouldn’t this feel more like a knife through my heart?

  “I—I can’t move in, Amy. I just can’t.” I glance at her, expecting to meet anger, but I guess the lack of passion we suffered throughout our relationship is now also manifesting itself during our termination of it—as a blessing in disguise.

  “Well then.” She looks away again, rubbing her palms on her jeans.

  And that’s how it ends. With two words of conclusion as nondescript as, perhaps, many characteristics of our life together.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I’ve given you two months to get your act together, Leigh,” Karen says. “Nothing has changed. It’s all just words, words, words.” She delves into her purse and produces the key I gave her a few weeks ago, as a token of my commitment. “I won’t be needing this anymore.”

  I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. But the partnership offer came two days after Karen and I had that conversation, and what was I supposed to say? “I’ll gladly accept your offer, Mister Schmidt, but I’ll need to work less because my girlfriend of only six months needs more attention.”

  Ironically, because I’m not in my twenties anymore, I’m tired as hell on this particular Friday evening when Karen raises the issue again, because I’ve just worked a seventy-hour week—of which seventy-five percent are billable hours—and my brain needs emptiness, or alcohol, or something else to unwind. But there’s no chance of any of that now.

  “I’m sorry.” I know I have to let her go this time. It would be too selfish of me to try to keep her. We never made it past the frantic sex stage. Entirely my fault, I know, because more time spent together is required for that. But, honestly, it’s not as if I ever felt bone-deep that Karen could be another love of my life. We wouldn’t be sitting here again if that were the case. “You’re right.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t fight,” Karen says. “Last time, I had to encourage you, and yet I was smitten enough to give you another chance. This time, I’m having enough self-respect not to beg.” She brushes a tear from her cheek. One that rouses instant regret from my soul. “But I don’t want this to be a relief for you. I want you to know, to really know, that this is killing me.” She reaches for a handkerchief in her purse. “I hope you feel as shitty as I do now when you wake up alone tomorrow.”

  I frantically search my vocabulary for words to make this better, to ease the pain, but I come up empty. “You do deserve better.”

  “Fuck yes, I do.” She runs the tissue under her nose. “I’m going.” She stands suddenly. I thought she would have more to say, but why would she give me the satisfaction of wasting any more of her time on me.

  “Hey.” I stand and rush toward her. I can’t let her leave as if she were just a stranger stopping by. As soon as I open my arms she falls against my chest, her curled fingers resting above my breast.

  “I’m so sorry,” I repeat. “You are a wonderful person, Karen. You’re kind and funny and… the right amount of kinky.” And I’m sorry I never got to meet any of your friends. And that I had to bail on that party you invited me to last week. And that most of the phone calls I made to you were to cancel our plans. I don’t say these things out loud because they are water under the bridge, and, as she said earlier, “just words, words, words” and when have words ever truly changed anything? “I hope you find someone who does deserve you.” Tears sting behind my eyes. Situations like this make me feel like a complete failure. Like I don’t have it anymore, the stuff that makes relationships work. Like self-sabotage is all I know.

  Karen pushes herself away from me, looks up at me one more time, and heads for the door.

  “You’re a fucking heartbreaker, Leigh Sterling,” she mumbles and leaves. It sounds like the right description of me. I’ve broken my own heart the most.

  After she’s gone I pour myself a large measure of vodka. I look around my characterless apartment and decide to give my realtor a call tomorrow. I’m ready for that house now. I’ve earned it. I need to have at least something to show for—and something to come home to after another twelve-hour day.

  My eyes rest on my phone. Out of nowhere, the urge to call Jodie creeps up on me. I glance at the clock. It’s 11 p.m. in New York. Would she still have the same number? Does she still live on York Avenue? I still have her mobile and home number stored in my phone. I grab it and scroll to her contact details. My heart beats in my throat. I feel more alive than I have in months, maybe years. Suddenly, the distinct certainty that I have to do this settles within me. That calling my ex at this very moment is what everything in my life after we broke up has led me to.

  Because with Jodie there were never any doubts about us making a viable couple. I knew after the first date. I knew weeks before I grabbed her wrists forcefully for the very first time. I couldn’t explain to myself why I knew because it was just a feeling, a dizzy spark riding in my veins, making my heart beat faster for her. The way she gesticulated with her hands when she tried to make a point. How she tilted her head when a bout of shyness overcame her. The way she spoke of her job, one of the hardest positions to have in a city like New York, with such zeal, despite the lousy pay and heartbreaking stories that filled her days. I’ve never seen that kind of fire burn in anyone’s eyes as long as I’ve been alive. Jodie cares. She cares about people everyone else has given up on. And she fights for them. She would rather have gotten fired than have lost a child in the system. But even someone with Jodie’s determination and skill to bend the rules couldn’t always make that happen. And when rules and the law and the system beat her, she always got back up again. Straightened that spine of hers and moved on to the next case, without ever forgetting about the child that had to be placed in a group home or detention center. Jodie always followed up.

  The only time she really cracked was when she’d heard that a boy named Jamal had died. He was barely thirteen years old and already his life had been so unbearable he’d hung himself in a room he shared with three other foster kids. Not even I could cheer Jodie up after that happened. Not for weeks. Yet, she never even for a minute considered changing careers. Jodie never gives up.

  I suggested it once, a few months after Jamal’s death, after she seemed to have gotten over it for the most part.

  “Do you see yourself doing this job until you retire?” I asked. It was our three-year anniversary and we’d gone to The Boathouse to get a good look at the park in autumn colors.

  “Don’t ask me that.” Back then, Jodie hadn’t picked up the habit of being snippy with me when I questioned something about her, so I was instantly taken aback. “This job is my life. Who else do these abandoned, abused, uncared for children have in their corner but someone like me?”

  I swallowed my follow-up questions—Don’t you want to make more money? Have a chance to be promoted? Do something less troubling?—right there and then.

  Once she started talking about having another child with the same fire burning in her eyes, I knew I would never be able to persuade her otherwise. If anything, her perfectly articulated reasons to have another made it very clear that I shouldn’t even try to stand in the way.

  It’s 8.05 p.m. My heart is still hammering away. I don’t even need to ask myself if she was the one I let get away. I know that she is. Fuck it. I’ve just been dumped. I’m doing it. I dial her number. It rings. Once. Twice. Then voicemail, but the message I hear is not recorded by her. It’s the standard one from her operator.

  When she’d first gotten a cell phone, she never switched it off at night. “You never know,” she said. I guess that changed when she had another child and sleep became more precious.

  I don’t leave a message. What would I say? If she’d picked up we could have had a conversation and I could have gauged her reaction, but I don’t want to burden her with a message from me on her phone after all these years.

&nb
sp; Deflated, I pour myself another vodka. I add a few ice cubes to lessen the sting. I hope the alcohol has the same effect on the sting that comes with being alone all over again. I’ve made some friends in San Francisco, but they’re mainly people from work and more acquaintances than anything else. I don’t really have a person I can call when I screw up an affair and who will rush over to my place and get wasted with me. My life might as well be defined by my work. Leigh Sterling, Attorney at Law—nothing else. Full stop.

  I raise my glass and mouth ‘to dentists’ because the world needs good dentists. Although Karen never tended to my teeth in a professional way, I’m sure she’s a fine one. And I guess it’s only logical that she couldn’t talk about her occupation with the same fervor that Jodie did. It’s only teeth. I take another sip to stop my mind going down that road.

  I let my eyes wander to the cabinet in the corner. I brought some stationery from the office just to be able to look at it. It took a few weeks for the name change—because I was never going to be anything less than a name partner—to trickle through to the office supplies, but it finally did last week. Schmidt, Burke & Sterling. It has a much better ring to it than just Schmidt & Burke.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  After Amy, I have two more affairs that develop into the beginning of a relationship, until I put a stop to them a few months in. Muriel eventually forgave me for breaking up with Amy for all the wrong reasons and signed me up to a dating website. Following a few chemistry-less encounters, I found myself in a coffee bar around the corner from my place with a woman named Sheryl. After saying goodbye to Sheryl, I actually had a certain giddiness in my heart and the proverbial spring in my step. She was a foul-mouthed police officer with the most beautiful eyes and something in her demeanor—a certain determination I hadn’t come across in a while—that promised fireworks in the bedroom. But, after the initial spark—and subsequent bedroom frenzy—started to make way for more conversation and getting to know each other better, I started to notice that we always ended up at her place and she showed little or no interest in coming to mine or meeting my children.

  A single mother with two children is a hard sell and after it became apparent that Sheryl had no real inclination to include my kids in her life, things had to end. I was not going down that road again. But at least I had tried.

  After Sheryl, I had a brief fling with the new girl in the legal department at work. Eve was ten years younger than I was, and she reminded me of myself when I was in my twenties. After office hours, we’d just drone on about work some more until it was time to go to bed—because we had to go to work in the morning. Eve was a dainty girl who wore blouses with lace on the collar and shiny knee-length skirts that didn’t really do that much for me. After a few months, we decided we’d be better off as friends. I had tried again. Something Muriel was always on my case about. As though she’d decided to promote my relationship status to her most important hobby.

  “Life is hard enough already. No need to go it alone,” was one of her favorite sayings. I agreed, but for a woman in her early forties, with a body marked by childbirth, and two children to show for it, datable women weren’t exactly lining up.

  I meet Suzy on the day Troy leaves for college. She appears in the bar where I decide to stop for a drink after having waved goodbye to Troy and Gerald, who is driving him to Berkeley. If it weren’t for Rosie, I might have joined them on their road trip, just for old times’ sake. As a final farewell to my boy’s childhood. And what a fine boy my son has become. He wants to be a lawyer, just like… I’m just about to let my thoughts wander to Leigh when a woman spills half of her drink on my table.

  “So sorry.” She has as thick a New York accent as I’ve ever heard. “I’m always a clumsy one. Did I ruin any of your belongings?”

  I look from her to the table, which is empty bar a small puddle of what looks like Guinness. I shake my head.

  “I’ll be right back to mop that up.” She flashes me a smile. “Can I leave that here for a second before I cause more wreckage?”

  “Sure.” She has the kind of smile that lights up a place.

  “Hey, Dave,” she yells at the barkeep. “I’ve done it again. Can you throw me a rag?”

  Dave rolls his eyes and pitches a cloth in her direction. “You won’t catch it,” he yells after it. And sure enough, as soon as the rag reaches the proximity of the woman’s hands it somehow ends up on the floor instead of between her fingers. She just shrugs and goes to work.

  “I’m Suzy,” she says to me when my table looks pristine, “Dave’s sister. I just moved in upstairs.”

  I hold out my hand while I introduce myself. “Do you work here?” I ask after our handshake ends.

  “Hell no.” She tilts her head toward the chair on the other end of my table. “Can I sit?”

  “Of course.” I’m glad for the company, what with Troy on his way to becoming a proper adult and Rosie spending the day with her grandparents, who’ve come down to say goodbye to Troy. Our dinner reservation is hours from now. I presumed I’d need some time to put myself together. “Pleasure to have you.” Little do I know at that moment that Suzy will almost be enough—almost.

  “I start in the bank around the corner next Monday. I just moved back here from New Jersey after the most boring year of my life. I thought I could live outside of this city, but turns out I can’t.” She drinks from her beer and some of the dark liquid sticks to her lips. Black lipstick would suit her well, I think. She’s the type for it. “You can take the girl out of New York and all that…” She narrows her eyes a little. “What’s your story? I mean, I do know better than to ask that question to a woman drinking alone in the middle of the afternoon, but if you care to indulge me?” She shoots me a wink. “It beats unpacking.”

  I tell her about just sending Troy off, and one drink turns into three, and before I know it I have to rush to meet Rosie and my parents at that tacky restaurant they love to go to on Times Square.

  “Stop by anytime, Jodie,” Suzy says as she leans back in her chair and gives me a very obvious once-over. “You will most likely find me here every night. Dave needs some help making this place more glamorous.” She yells the last bit so her brother can hear.

  * * *

  I’m back for more of Suzy a few days later. Just for a quick drink after work. I find her holding court at the bar, regaling a motley crew of bar flies with a story that features a horse and a pig. Her personality is magnetic and I can’t seem to get her out of my head. I want to know more. During our conversation a few days earlier she made no mention of having a partner and when she referred to her ex the one time, she didn’t call him or her by name. Besides, I know what flirting looks like.

  I take a seat at the bar a few stools from her and order a martini from Dave. He not-so-discreetly signals Suzy that I’ve arrived.

  “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” Suzy exclaims. “There’s a lady here who requires my attention.” Her words make me go all fuzzy inside. She kisses me on each cheek and her perfume drifts up my nostrils. Immediately, I regret not having arranged a babysitter. I’ll need to leave in forty minutes to pick up Rosie.

  “Let’s slide into a booth,” Suzy says and leads the way. She’s dressed in the tightest pair of black jeans I’ve seen on a woman above forty, a black vest and not much else. Maybe she’s making the most of her freedom to dress before she begins work at the bank. When I sit down opposite her, I notice a tattoo of a music note on the inside of her wrist. She’s a wild one, I can sense it.

  “I was hoping you’d come back.” There’s that smile again. Her hair is short but still manages to point to all sides, as if she hasn’t owned a comb in years.

  “I’m glad I did.”

  “Any news from your boy?” The fact that she inquires about Troy warms me to my core, just as her mere presence did on the day.

  “I only call him once every day,” I joke.

  When I chuckle, Suzy gives a belly laugh. “How about the little on
e?” If she wants to seduce me, she’s doing an excellent job of it. Appearing genuinely interested in my children really is the best way to go. Maybe I should just ask her out.

  “She’s at a friend’s. I have to pick her up in a bit.” I look at my watch. “Sorry I can’t stay longer, but, erm, I—”

  “Yes.” Suzy is nodding vigorously. “Let’s go out sometime.” She’s probably one of the least inhibited people I’ve ever met. “I would like that very much.”

  And just like that I have a date with Suzy Henderson, who lives around the corner from my building, whose muscles don’t tense when I mention my children, and whose rock-chick exterior and big mouth make my head spin a little.

  * * *

  Because of Suzy’s extensive knowledge of the bar scene on the Upper East Side we end up going on a modest bar crawl, ending up at Henderson’s for a night cap. By the time Dave brings us two whiskeys I’m so hammered I wouldn’t hesitate to go upstairs with Suzy if she invited me, although I’d probably end up falling asleep the instant I took my clothes off.

  Our first date is pleasant enough, and I get schooled in interesting facts about my neighborhood, but Suzy seems to like a drink, and I find it hard to keep up. Thank goodness it’s Friday night and I’ll have an entire weekend to recover from this bender.

  “God, I’m so tempted to take advantage of you.” By the time Suzy says this in her clear, booming voice, I’m not shocked anymore. She peppered our entire evening with forward phrases and come-ons like that. I adore the fact that she has zero qualms about showing interest in me. “But I think, for first dates’ sake, it is required that I walk you home and kiss you chastely on the cheek outside your front door instead.” She has finished her whiskey already while mine remains untouched.

  I chuckle and gesture for her to have it. “I would prefer to remember our first kiss.” I look into her blue-grey eyes. They’re alive with amusement and joy.