She sighed. “Because they’re always a little short.”
He nodded approvingly. “Well, will you look at her! All right, how about this: Paddy told Murphy that his wife was driving him to drink. Murphy told Paddy he’s a lucky bastard because his own wife makes him walk.”
Maggie groaned but she couldn’t stop him from launching into a series of Irish jokes, delivered in a terribly unconvincing brogue, which lasted all the way through dessert.
Maggie was twenty-two when he passed away, and even now, ten years later, the thought of it was jarring. She recalled a line from a poem she had memorized in college: No thing that ever flew, not the lark, not you, can die as others do.
But he was gone, and maybe Gabe was gone as well. It was almost ten, and the sky outside had turned pure black. Maggie looked at her phone. No missed calls.
In twelve hours, they were supposed to be leaving for Maine. Should she still go? She wished she were the kind of person who could bury her head under the covers and order pizza from Fascati’s every afternoon and ignore reality, without thinking obsessively about him, or showing up at his door like a lunatic.
Maybe they’d make up in a day, or a week’s time, and carry on with their plan. But Gabe was rarely flexible like that, never kind after a battle. And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn’t happen. That was just the way life went.
She sat up in bed now, and looked around at her place, the whole apartment—minus the tiny bathroom—visible from where she was. Could she really raise a child in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, alone? She had thought that she was ready to be a mother. But maybe the whole idea was absurd. If it was really over, she wondered how long she could stay here, before the ghosts of them would be too strong to bear. This apartment had brought them together, and every bit of it reminded her of him.
Theirs was one of those meeting stories everybody loved. Friends often asked them to repeat it to strangers at parties, or told them it sounded like the plot of a movie. He had lived in her apartment before she did, and months after she moved in, his mail still flooded the box by the door. At that point, she hadn’t published a single story. She kept a small stack of form rejection letters from literary magazines of varying quality, a few with handwritten words of encouragement at the bottom, which thrilled her when she read them, though hours later she’d feel mortified by her excitement over being turned down nicely. Meanwhile, dozens of envelopes from Simon & Schuster arrived at her new place, addressed to Gabe, and she wondered what they might contain—fat advance checks, or royalty statements, or invitations to have his book published in foreign countries around the globe. She never opened any of the letters, which she later reminded him when he accused her of having snooping in her DNA. It wasn’t biological, she insisted. It was situational. A sensible woman could catch a man in only so many lies before she started to hunt for clues of betrayal. Snoop and ye shall find, he’d say dismissively. Well, actually, yes, she’d think. In your case, yes.
Anyway, she found the letters inspiring: Here was a New York writer who had not only secured a publisher, but was so above it all that he could just walk away without even leaving a forwarding address. In her imagination, he was reclusive, brooding, and brilliant. She felt lucky to have taken over his space. The thought of him helped her write, helped her keep going, and she’d joke about it to friends, how the literary power of her neighborhood’s former tenants—Truman Capote, Walt Whitman, Carson McCullers, and Gabe Warner, whose book she could never locate at the library—acted as her muse.
When she sold her collection of short stories, she wanted to dedicate it to her mother, but didn’t want her father to feel bad. She couldn’t very well make it out to both of them. Considering they had not been comfortably in the same room since her fifth grade ballet recital, it seemed cruel to make them live together on the page for all eternity. At the last minute, she decided to dedicate it to him, a perfect stranger: To Gabe Warner, whoever you are. Thanks for making a writer’s life seem possible. Her mother was pissed, but what could you do?
Gabe had heard about it through a friend who had an advance copy, and so he showed up at her book party looking like the stunning, cocky bastard he was, wearing a suede jacket with elbow patches and jeans, coming right up to her and saying in his clipped prep school voice, “Maggie Doyle, I presume.”
It wasn’t until later that night, when they were lying in her bedroom, which had once been his bedroom, that she realized what his book had been: a manual for do-it-yourself naked photos called Tasteful Nudes for the At-Home Pro, with tips on how to hide your belly fat and light a room, how to incorporate props, how to destroy the evidence if your relationship went south or you ever wanted to run for public office. Gabe had been approached to do it by a young editor friend, and he said yes, for a laugh. The book was never published, because naturally he hadn’t ever gotten around to handing in his final draft. The unopened letters from Simon & Schuster, from which she had drawn so much inspiration, were demands to get the book in, or else he’d be sued for his advance money.
Gabe had left the apartment and New York to follow a girlfriend to Boulder. But by the time of Maggie’s book party he was back in the city, newly dumped, living with Cunningham and working as a part-time stringer at the Daily News. During one of their first dates, he told her with pride about a computer file of stock images he kept for the occasions when they’d ask him to go shoot weather.
“You wouldn’t believe how stupid photo editors are,” he said. “I mean, all these requests to capture kids playing soccer on a sunny day, or snow falling on taxicabs, or—my absolute favorite—rainbows. They’re basically asking me to use and reuse the same shit, right?”
(Shortly thereafter, he was fired for doing just that. Now he got by on the odd freelance gig and biweekly checks from his father. The handouts embarrassed Maggie, but Gabe seemed to accept them just fine.)
Even then, so early on, she had a nagging feeling that she ought to run. This guy wasn’t an author, as she’d thought, but an overprivileged slacker photographer who had agreed to write a book about homemade porn. She told herself to stop being negative and look on the bright side. Perhaps he hadn’t finished it because he knew how gross it was. And now she’d never have to explain it to her parents.
He taught her how to deal with all the weird nuances of her own apartment: how to flush the toilet so the handle wouldn’t come loose, the correct way to screw in the antique glass light fixtures, his trick of slicing an orange and heating it up gently on the stove to kill the unpredictable mix of smells from the Korean restaurant downstairs. Mr. Fatelli had been there for years (Rhiannon had come along shortly after Gabe moved out), and he was somewhat baffled when he saw Gabe hanging around the place again, eventually seeming to settle on the belief that the two of them had lived there together all along. For some reason, things like this made Maggie feel like they belonged.
And if Gabe was a slacker, at least he was smart—his new place was filled with books, piled high on every chair and in each corner, mixed in with Cunningham’s ridiculously huge collection of eighties movies on VHS. On Saturday mornings they would sit and read on the couch, their bare feet touching, each of them occasionally pointing out a funny passage to the other.
Twice, Gabe had come over to trap and kill a mouse after midnight. He had put together her table and chairs from Ikea. On the morning of her thirty-second birthday, he woke her up with a homemade chocolate cake, a ring of glowing candles around the edge, like mothers always baked in movies set in the fifties. In his best moments, he seemed like someone who could take care of her. Though she was thirty when they met and in some ways had been caring for herself since she was a little girl, she found with some surprise that she wanted this, needed it.
Gabe had gone up to Boston with her for Easter the previous spring. He and her brother, Chris, goofed around in a back pew, struggling to be quiet in that way you do when something seems all the more hilarious
because you know you cannot laugh out loud. Her aunt Ann Marie had shot them a look, and Maggie caught her eye, making a face that said she too disapproved. But in fact, she felt joyful watching her brother and her boyfriend, side by side. She imagined them being close for years to come—golfing in Ogunquit each summer, grilling out in the yard between the cottage and her grandparents’ place as their children ran this way and that, and fireflies zipped from tree to tree.
But she couldn’t always rely on Gabe. Once, sent out to pick up her prescription when she had strep throat, he got distracted by a friend from work, went for drinks, and ended up telling her to get the medicine herself—he was all the way in Manhattan, but if she really wanted, he’d be happy to pay for the delivery. They argued like crazy, almost from the start. Sometimes Gabe lied, even when the truth would do: He’d go out drinking with Cunningham until two a.m. and say he was on a photo assignment. He’d have a boozy lunch with an old girlfriend, and only fess up after Maggie unearthed the hundred-dollar receipt in his wallet. He seemed to get off on tricking her, making her wonder whether she was really as controlling as he said, or if he just had some sort of mommy complex, or both.
There were moments when her stomach sank a bit, when she wondered what exactly he was made of, and whether it could really last through the long haul. Like the night, a few months into their relationship, when they went with the Goons to a wedding in Gabe’s hometown in Connecticut. The wedding was an over-the-top affair, customary among Gabe’s rich friends. But even so, Cunningham and Hayes were behaving like—well, like Cunningham and Hayes.
Cunningham was one thing: boorish and annoying, but at least he tried to make conversation. Hayes still lived with his parents. He had an entire wing of his childhood home to himself, complete with a housekeeper. Half of what he said took the form of the phrase “Something this, motherfucker.” For example, when Gabe had asked him in the church before the ceremony started whether he had remembered to turn off his phone, Hayes replied, “Phone this, motherfucker.”
Hayes could hardly hold down a job, and seemed to live only in memory.
“Remember when Gabe’s car was stolen after college?” he said over dinner.
Cunningham snorted. “Yeah, poor Gabe. Insurance company took good care of you after you claimed the brand-new golf clubs in the trunk and the—what was it now?”
“Two thousand CDs,” Hayes said.
Cunningham pounded a fist on the table. “That’s right. Two thousand CDs. Big trunk that must have been. He didn’t have to work for a year and a half.”
“I worked,” Gabe said in a mock defensive tone.
“Oh sure, you worked at Mike’s Deli nine hours a week ’cause those guys were the easiest way to score coke in town,” Hayes said.
Gabe laughed uproariously. He didn’t look at Maggie. She felt her whole body tighten. She knew Gabe drank too much. She was sensitive about it because of her parents’ drinking, so she tried not to be a scold. But he had told her early on that like her, he had never touched drugs.
Hayes’s date gave Maggie a worried glance. “Who wants more wine?” she said.
“Wine this, motherfucker,” Hayes said, and he snorted with laughter.
Maggie pushed her chair away from the table and said she was heading up to their hotel room to bed, even though it was only nine thirty, and the cake hadn’t even been cut. The Goons and their matching blond dates looked up with alarm. Gabe’s big brown eyes pleaded with her not to make a scene.
He didn’t come upstairs until four a.m., reeking of scotch and knocking the suitcase off the dresser. He pulled his shoes and pants and shirt off clumsily, and climbed into bed beside her, where she had been lying awake for hours, watching the red neon minutes click by on the alarm clock. She wanted his arms around her, an apology, but she knew she wouldn’t get it, and it was no use fighting with him when he was drunk.
He switched on the TV—some stupid Adam Sandler movie at top volume. Her heart sped up, with the familiar mix of sadness and exhilaration that preceded a fight. She rolled over and faced him.
“Turn that down, please,” she said coolly.
“It’s not that loud,” he said.
“I was sleeping.”
“You made an ass of me tonight,” he said. “Why’d you have to go and do that?”
“You never told me that you used to do cocaine,” she said. “I was kind of in shock.”
“I used to do a lot of stuff before I knew you,” he said.
“Oh? Like what?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You said you’d never tried drugs,” she said, feeling like a naïve child in an after-school special.
“Well, I guess I lied. One more thing for you to hate about me.”
His tone was so indifferent that she began to cry.
“Do you do it anymore?” she asked.
“Jesus Christ, Maggie, lay off,” he said. Then he softened a bit. “I haven’t done it in years.”
“When was the last time?”
“God, I can’t even remember,” he said. “Come on. I love you. Why are you being like this?”
“And what was all that about the golf clubs and the CDs? Did you commit insurance fraud? I don’t understand it, because obviously you didn’t need the money.”
“Damn it, Maggie, are you a fucking undercover cop, or what?” he yelled. “Didn’t you ever do anything stupid or crazy when you were twenty-two years old?”
The answer, as they both knew, was no.
He switched the TV off and threw the clicker to the floor.
“I want you to go in the morning,” he said. “I’ve had enough. I’ll drop you off at the train first thing. I’ll get a ride back.”
They had been planning to stay two more nights, to visit his parents and older sister, but this was always how he punished her—pushing her away, telling her to go, because he knew she couldn’t bear it.
Tears crept from the corners of her eyes and down to her lips.
“Fine,” she said bitterly. And now came the regret, because he had told her he loved her, they had been so close to making up, but she kept pushing.
A moment later, he was asleep. She stayed awake until morning, thinking, thinking. Was it just the childhood imprint of watching her parents go at each other at the breakfast table or at one of her brother’s soccer games—screaming, shouting, storming off, only to make up again a few hours later? Is that why she fought with Gabe the way she did? Had she really been drawn to a hard-drinking, short-tempered man, when these were the exact traits in her parents that scared her the most? Her mother said that alcoholics tended to seek one another out as a way to make themselves feel normal. Maybe that extended to their children as well.
Maggie thought, as she often did at times like this, about her cousin Patty. She had been raised by the even-keeled, forever happy Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat, and she had easily fallen in love with and married Josh, her law school boyfriend who was sweet and kind. It really might be as simple as that—good model, happiness; bad model, despair.
Her shrink had said once that the right sort of relationship wouldn’t require so much thought. It would just fit. Maggie had wanted to point out that if that were true—if love actually came easy and stayed that way—the woman would likely be out of a job.
The problem was that you couldn’t divide a person up, pick and choose the parts you liked and the parts you didn’t. There were parts of Gabe that made her love him so much that she wanted to hold on to him forever, even though there was no such thing. She could actually cry at the thought of him dying before she did, when they were both in their nineties.
He stirred around seven o’clock, and she reached for him, running her hand down his stomach, dipping her fingers under the elastic band of his boxer shorts.
“You awake?” she said, feeling desperate for him, when he lay right there beside her.
He grunted.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been such a d
rama queen.”
Gabe opened his eyes. He grinned. “Damn woman, you’re Oscar-worthy.”
With those words came the familiar flood of relief: the fight was over, and it hadn’t ended them. She slid his boxers down and climbed on top of him, kissing his neck. He pulled off her T-shirt and licked her nipples in tiny perfect circles. They made love and afterward he ordered them eggs Benedict from room service, and made Maggie laugh with the story of how Cunningham’s girlfriend, Shauna, had passed out drunk on an ice sculpture after Maggie went upstairs.
“So, can I stay?” she said, in a child’s voice that she hated the sound of.
“Are you going to behave yourself?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good, because I hate being away from you.”
“Me too.”
Things were fine between them for a few months after that. Gabe took her for a surprise long weekend in Berlin, and they had an amazing time popping into galleries and cafés. They stayed in a five-star palace, which had been the setting for the Greta Garbo film Grand Hotel. (Maggie sent her grandmother a postcard to tell her so.) She was impressed with how easily Gabe spoke to the locals, how charmed everyone seemed by him. She felt proud to be the one he had chosen.
But then one Friday night back in New York he canceled their dinner plans abruptly because he said he was coming down with a cold. She asked him if she ought to come over and bring him some soup, but he was tired and said he didn’t want to get her sick. He called her before ten and said he was going to bed. The next day, sensing that he had lied (he seemed perfectly healthy to her, and it wasn’t the first time she’d heard him pretend to be sick), Maggie looked through the call log on his cell phone while he was out picking up lunch, and there they were: two calls from the previous night, around three and four a.m., to a random number she didn’t recognize.
Feeling sick to her stomach, Maggie dialed the number from her own phone and heard a voice mail recording: “You’ve reached Stephanie. Leave a message.”
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