Life After Yes

by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

  Buoyed by alcohol and the confidence it divines, we bantered beautifully, washing down Kisses and conversation with wine and whiskey.

  We talked about Halloween, how we both still loved the holiday. How we could be kids for one day and pretend to be someone else, something else. We talked about our all-time favorite costumes (his: Batman, homemade; mine: Strawberry Shortcake, store-bought). I told him about Halloween in the city; how kids from the neighborhood would convene on our block on the Upper West Side and go brownstone-to-brownstone en masse, collecting candy from perfect strangers. I told him how much I hated it when some wiseass would hand out toothbrushes.

  We debated the virtues of open bar and came to the consensus that it was both a beautiful and a dangerous thing.

  “Where is your girlfriend?” I asked, pulling a small fishing fly from the fleece drying pouch on his vest and studying it under the red lantern that hung above the bar.

  “Don’t have one,” he said. “Where is your boyfriend?”

  “Uptown,” I said. “Is it wrong that I’m still fishing even though I’ve already snagged one?”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  “A Parachute Adams,” I said, reattaching the fly to his vest. “An oldie but a goodie. Perhaps the most important and versatile dry fly. One of Dad’s favorites.”

  “Not bad,” he said. “Tied it myself.”

  Before I knew it, there we were trading vital statistics, like clichéd young drunken souls in bars do, like we were reading from the backs of baseball cards. Names. Colleges. Hometowns. Occupations.

  Sage McIntyre. Played baseball at Duke. Savannah-bred. An investment banker.

  Quinn O’Malley. Dartmouth. Columbia. City girl. Law student.

  That night I went back to his apartment, a glorified dorm room with a fake wall.

  Though the apartment smelled vaguely of beer and pizza and bad aftershave, his room was clean. On the windowsill, silver picture frames glimmered, but in the dim light, I couldn’t make out the faces. His bed was made, and while he was in the bathroom I lifted his comforter and saw something at once amazing and alarming: meticulous hospital corners.

  “So let’s talk about this fishing business,” he said, reappearing.

  “What do you want to know? I’m an odd species. A fly-fishing New Yorker. Never done much spin fishing; Dad thinks it’s for the lazy man. He’s the real deal. Compared to him, I just pretend.”

  He smiled. “There’s plenty of time to talk shop, Quinn. I want to know why you’re still fishing when you’ve already caught one.”

  I looked at him.

  “Your words, not mine.”

  “I really don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know?”

  And I didn’t. Why was I there in this apartment with this strange boy making small talk when I had a keeper at home?

  “He’s a great guy,” I said, “but…”

  And in a rare moment, this lawyer-to-be had nothing to say. I wasn’t being coy, or trying to appear mysterious. This wasn’t about sparing him details about another man, or theories I had on the trajectory of relationships. The truth was I didn’t know why I was doing this. Whatever it was I was doing.

  “You don’t have to justify it to me,” he said. “I get it. I dated the same girl through high school and college, Sally. A good girl. She and my mother were just waiting for me to get down on my knee and I couldn’t do it. I knew there was something bigger to wait for. She just wasn’t The One,” he says. “And maybe your guy isn’t either?”

  “The One?” I said, and cringed. I didn’t believe in The One or soul mates or any of these hokey, new agey, bullshit concepts. “Can we go back to talking fishing flies and pretend you didn’t say that?”

  He smiled. “Sorry, that’s my mother talking. She checks in daily to see if I’ve encountered The One. She’s itching for grandkids.”

  “Ah,” I say. “A good old-fashioned mama’s boy, I presume?”

  “Guilty as charged, daddy’s girl,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Speaking of guilt and innocence, law school?”

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Any chance you’re still fishing for a career even though you’ve already snagged one?”

  I smiled.

  “Scared to be in the company of a budding young attorney?”

  “I haven’t done anything illegal,” he said. “Not yet at least.”

  “Banking?” I said. “Two can play at this game.”

  “I’ve always loved numbers. Math major in college. Do you know how many times I’ve been invited to Vegas because I’m good with numbers? Banking’s just like gambling, really.”

  “So, it’s not about the money, then? The cuff links and summer homes?”

  “The money can’t hurt,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt, peeling it off, folding it, and placing it on the floor.

  “Only if you let it,” I said.

  He looked at me, perplexed.

  “Let me guess: only child?” I said.

  He was silent for a moment. Looked down. Traced a broad stripe on his faded comforter—no doubt a relic from college days—with his fingertip.

  “I am now,” he said.

  In that dark and silent room, where moonlight mingled with the green glow of his clock radio, I waited for him to elaborate. But he didn’t.

  “You are now?” I asked, and suddenly chubby little boy faces—two of them—were cruelly crisp in those sparkling silver frames.

  “I had a brother named Henry,” he said, his voice crackly and soft, his Southern accent suddenly more detectable. “He was six years younger.”

  “Was,” I say, and nod.

  And though I wanted to know what happened, why he used that brutally simple past tense when talking of his brother, I didn’t ask. But he told me anyway.

  “It was Christmas Eve. I was sixteen and he was ten. We were hanging lights on the fence around our property. Henry started at one end and I started at the other. Our plan, like every year, was to meet in the middle. I was faster than him, close to that middle spot when I saw it happen. The black car, the loud music, the faint and familiar scream.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  Sage fought tears. “The ambulance came, but it was too late. My father tried everything, CPR. But he stood up, covered in Henry’s blood, Christmas red, and stared at my mother and me. He never said so, but I know he blamed us. Still does. My mother for not watching us. Me for not protecting my kid brother. Me for not catching the numbers on the license plate as the car sped away. I’m obsessed with numbers. Have a photographic memory. I could remember the exact number of fence posts we snaked lights through, the song that drunk bastard was playing, but I didn’t even think to look at the license plate.”

  “You were just a kid,” I said. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  A few tears escaped those beautiful eyes, innocent and blue, and his cheeks glistened.

  “It happened over ten years ago,” he said. “You’d think it would get better.”

  “It will?” I said lamely, as if I had a clue about this kind of thing.

  “I go home on his birthday every year,” he said. “In August. My mother makes his favorite blackberry pie.”

  I nodded and rubbed his back.

  “She hasn’t been the same since. She started drinking when it happened. To escape, I think. And my father basically disappeared when Henry did. He’s barely home. He works, he travels, makes money. She bakes and gardens and goes to church on Sunday. I worry about her. It’s as if she has nothing to live for.”

  And though I’d never met this woman and barely knew this guy, in that fragile moment I said something, something that seemed to comfort him. And something that couldn’t have been more true. “She has you.”

  Sage nodded. And curled up on his bed. Pulled me down next to him, draping a strong arm around me, holding me tight. And I lay there, happily trapped by a boy’s tears and a man’s muscles.

&n
bsp; “Sage?” I said, before nodding off next to him.

  “Yes?”

  “How many fence posts?”

  “Eleven,” he said. “Eleven posts.”

  “What song was playing in the car?” I asked, hungry for this detail. I’m not sure why I needed to know these things. Maybe I wanted to know everything about this guy. Or maybe I knew that this was my chance. That this was the last time he would talk to me (in a very long time) about Henry.

  “‘Silent Night,’” he said. “It was ‘Silent Night.’”

  “Oh,” I said. “I love that one.”

  “I did too,” he whispered as his eyes, still damp, drifted shut. “I did too.”

  I woke up the next morning, my cheek itchy. I looked down at the pillow and there it was. One of those little white rectangular labels that said “Sage McIntyre” in bold black type. I smiled and folded it back inside the pillowcase. I felt like I was back in camp.

  “She still irons labels into my things,” Sage said, sitting up, rubbing his eyes. “She can’t sit still. She clips coupons every Sunday and never uses them. Doesn’t need to. You should see our garden.”

  I smiled. Thought of my own mother, how she sent me off to camp with a Sharpie in case I felt the urge to mark my things. How she killed every plant that we ever brought into our home.

  I stood and gathered my things. My high heels, my angel wings.

  Outside, the autumn sun climbed through the buildings. A new day.

  “Do you have any bacon?” I asked. “A Bloody Mary?”

  Met with a befuddled grin, I tried again. “How about coffee?”

  “That, I think I can do.”

  Only when he left the room did I study the pictures in the polished silver frames. Of two blond boys, one tall and one small. Matching smiles and matching haircuts. In one, they were very young and peered over the edge of a bathtub. In another, they wore baseball uniforms. And in another, they wore fishing gear. And in yet another, they flanked a beautiful woman, petite and blond, same oversized smile. His mother.

  In the tiny kitchen, Sage fumbled nervously with a box of coffee filters and grabbed a bag of grounds from the freezer. From his bedroom door, I watched him putter around, wiping down the counters, chucking his roommate’s box of late night pizza.

  I ducked into the bathroom. Noted the clichéd trappings of the twenty-something banker breed along the slim countertop—the medley of colognes and razors, the pile of dirty towels, the empty toilet paper roll crushed in the corner.

  Only when I looked at myself in the mirror, at the broad smile I hadn’t worn in a while, did I think of Phelps. I pictured him at my apartment. Beginning a new day just like it was any other.

  And then I waited. For the guilt to wash over me. But curiously it didn’t come.

  I hadn’t slept with another man. Hadn’t even kissed him.

  But even so, I knew there was no going back.

  I walked into the kitchen. Sage smiled. Handed me a mug that said, “Georgia: We Put the ‘Fun’ in Fundamentalist Extremism!” “I hope it’s okay,” he said. “It’s my roommate’s coffee. I’m more of a tea man myself.”

  “A tea man, huh?” I joked. “Is there such a thing?”

  “Indeed, there is,” he said, smiling.

  The coffee was bitter, but I drank it.

  When his phone rang, Sage skipped off to his room to get it. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said.

  And maybe that’s exactly what I should’ve done: gotten out of there. For there were plenty of those proverbial red flags. Lined up, clear as day, waving furiously in that figurative and foreboding wind. The way he said “my mother,” for one, like she was his possession that I might steal. That he talked about his ex-girlfriend and dead brother in the first twelve hours. That he was an investment banker and a neat freak and a tea drinker and Southern.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

  He returned a few moments later, wearing his fishing shirt from the night before, buttoned wrong over khakis.

  “Who calls you at this hour?” I asked.

  “My mother,” he says. “She’s an early bird.”

  “Mama’s boy,” I said.

  He nodded, running fingers through dirty blond hair that flopped over his eyes and made him appear all of seventeen.

  “Daddy’s girl,” he said.

  I drained my coffee.

  He smiled, his cheeks pinked. He took the coffee mug from my hand and placed it on the counter.

  I unbuttoned his shirt and rebuttoned it the right way. Then I opened the front door and took a single step into the hallway, long and beige. And Sage stood there, barefoot on the other side of the threshold. He reached out, took my hand. Pulled me closer.

  And we met in the middle.

  “Well, did you tell your darling mother that you found The One?” I said.

  He smiled and pulled something from his pocket, slipped it in my hand. Then he cupped my chin, and studied my face. Looked me in the eyes. Kissed my lips gently and then pulled away.

  “Maybe I did,” he said, optimism plain in simple words. “All you need is one.”

  And as I traveled down that dim hallway, walking away but going nowhere, I opened my hand. And there it was.

  A lone Tootsie Pop.

  Chapter 5

  Every morning, I let the terrorists win. Secret Service–cushioned Bush tells me to be defiant, to be a strong American. I know what I should do. I should skip defiantly down cracking concrete steps and take the subway. But I never do this. In my veins, paranoia runs deep.

  Truth is, I have visions of an odd-shaped navy backpack on the evening news, smoke billowing from caves below city streets, charred morning newspapers and coffee cups strewn about, left behind. Something’s going to happen down there one day and I’m not going to be there to live it.

  A therapist would have a field day with me given the chance.

  Most people can’t afford that attitude, Sage says. And of course, he’s right.

  Well, we can, knowing just how awful I must sound. But we can.

  Sage still takes the subway. He says it doesn’t make him nervous. Statistically, he argues, it’s far safer than putting oneself at the mercy of some sleep-deprived crazy behind the wheel of a taxi. Plus, it’s faster and important to stay grounded, to mingle with the masses. Even, especially, in the wake of disaster. And on top of all that, it’s far cheaper.

  So, my man doesn’t let the terrorists win. Sometimes, I’m confident this has more to do with not letting me win than saving cash or safeguarding American freedom.

  This morning’s no different. I hail a taxi.

  The cheery yellow is only on the outside. Today, my taxi smells like body odor and some kind of souvlaki. A dirty plastic dog bone dangles from the rearview mirror and swings violently as the driver—unsurprisingly named Mohammed—somehow jerks in and out of lanes of unmoving cars. He seems very young, twenty at most. A long, skinny neck props up his bizarrely shaped head that shouldn’t be bald. He has a small, unidentifiable tattoo that might be a birthmark. His eyes are small and dark like raisins.

  Never talk to strangers, Dad said to me before I took my first solo ride on the public bus. He and Mom were big fans of public transportation. I’m convinced this was an attempt to distract Michael and me from the fact that we were wealthy, to keep us innocent and unspoiled, a tough, if not impossible, feat in the world of Manhattan. The universal parental lecture was no doubt meant to keep me safe and sound. It was really that simple. Armed with this rudimentary wisdom and a mere decade of life, I was sent into a world full of strangers of different shapes and sizes, most of whom had no interest in talking to little me.

  What Dad never told me is that we’re always at the mercy of strangers—the strangers who make up our government’s administration, the strangers who interview us for jobs, the strangers who fly our planes and drive our taxis, those who make our coffee.

  And those who terrorize our days.

  “I’m
getting married,” I say aloud, presumably to the perfect stranger in the front seat.

  And Mohammed turns and looks at me like I am crazy. “Good luck, woman,” he says.

  For the remainder of the ride, I sit in the backseat, wrestling with my BlackBerry, fighting nausea, e-mailing my best friend, Kayla. I write: Engaged this wknd and hit send before I lose my breakfast. Never did I imagine sharing such monumental life news from a taxicab with a sentence fragment and an emoticon.

  Mohammed is a polite man, but a vicious driver. Perfect combination. He doesn’t smile in his license picture or in the front seat. But he gets me there. As we pull up in front of my office building, I scan the cracked leather seat, running my fingertips over the broken surface, curiously warm in spots. I trace the wrinkled stickiness of masking tape, making sure I have everything. I reach around my boots to find my bag, feel the remnants of yesterday’s snow, and slice the palm of my hand on a broken and rusting umbrella. I wish Mom were here with her foolproof maternal memory to assure me I am up-to-date on tetanus shots. But she isn’t here and there’s no way I’m up-to-date. I find a royal blue condom wrapper and a business card for a man named Ralph who specializes in speedy patio renovation.

  I slam the taxi door and push through the revolving glass doors into the lobby. My office building is on Park Avenue. It’s one of those sleek and towering, marble and mahogany beasts that impresses camcorder-toting tourists on a daily basis and tingles the pride of parents who drop by for outrageously priced chopped salads with yuppie children.

  Once upon a time, poking out above the Manhattan skyline was a good thing.

  This year’s tree is still up, blanketed in tiny white lights and blinding ornaments. Someone wants to stretch the Christmas cheer that never quite materialized this year. Each November, those of us lucky enough to escape for Thanksgiving return to the grand tree. Each year’s tree surpasses its predecessor in girth and greenness.

  At first, I wondered where the poor tree lived before being yanked to remind us of holiday cheer. Certainly, it was far too big to be one of the lush Douglas firs peddled by ruggedly attractive Canadian men who populate the city’s pee-soaked pavement beginning each November. Eye candy for disgruntled wives and overwrought supermommies, these men slide into town in the darkness of night, take turns sleeping in blue vans with tinted windows, and gouge New Yorkers with prices we recognize as exorbitant, but prices we are simply too exhausted to bargain down.