The Myth of You and Me: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  21

  In the morning I woke and lay there for a few minutes, waiting for the knowledge of where I was to come to me. In that instant before it did, I had the familiar feeling, both magical and terrifying, that I’d been transported into another life while I slept. When I realized where I was, I wished I had been. I was hung over in a motel room in some in-between town, neither where I’d been nor where I was going.

  Outside I could hear the housekeeper’s cart trundling by. I imagined living a life where that was the first sound I heard every morning, where I ordered all my meals from room service and spent my days watching cable television, sometimes leaving to eat at a fast-food place or buy toiletries from a superstore. I could be anyplace in America. It mattered to no one, not even me, where I was.

  I called Sonia to see if she was back. Her machine answered, and I said, “Pick up if you’re there,” and waited, listening to a faint whirring on the other end of the line. “Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll go to New York.” I waited again, but she still didn’t answer. “I don’t know what else to do,” I said, and then, embarrassed by how lost my voice sounded, I hung up.

  When Sonia and I left Clovis for college, she was far more nervous than I. I’d lived enough places to make inhabiting the wider world seem not only possible but inevitable. Home was just a place where I happened to be. But Sonia had never been east of Dallas, west of the Grand Canyon, or north of Oklahoma City. She couldn’t be sure that everything she knew about herself was portable. Now I was the one feeling that the more places I went, the more of myself I left behind.

  Back on the road, I turned south on 91 and went straight through Hartford to the Connecticut coast. Just past Bridgeport, I called information for Owen’s number and address. When I called him, his machine picked up, and at the familiar sound of his voice, I felt even more dislocated in time and space. “Hi,” I said, and then, because I didn’t know how to explain why I was calling, what I wanted, I hung up the phone. An hour later I was in Brooklyn, looking for a parking place on his street.

  Owen’s apartment was above a deli. I stood outside for a few minutes, looking at his last name beneath the buzzer, and then I lost my nerve and walked up the block. I hadn’t been to New York in four years. I’d forgotten the feeling of being caught up in something that you could get just from walking down the street, all those people hustling with you and against you. It seemed to me you could walk the streets of New York and feel you’d lived an active life without ever doing anything at all. I moved like I was going somewhere, but the farther from Owen’s door I got, the more I thought about Will’s fingers tracing the lines of my ribcage, his warm breath against my skin, and then the time I saw him bend to place a kiss on the rise of Sonia’s breast.

  I walked back, and when I was still some distance away I spotted Owen, standing on the corner outside the deli. He hadn’t seen me yet. He stood with both hands on his lower back, elbows splayed. It was the position he assumed when he was thinking hard about something. Suddenly he looked up and saw me. He did a double take, lifted a hand in greeting, and jogged toward me across the street.

  His face had never been full, but it seemed to have lost a certain softness. Other than that he looked exactly the same. He was wearing a Paul Westerberg concert tee and a pair of jeans that were beginning to fray at the ankles. “Cameron?” he said. “Holy shit.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  Right there on the street he pulled me into a hug. He held me tight for a moment—I fought a surprising urge to cry—and then he stepped back and smiled. “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “I’m looking for Sonia,” I said.

  He looked puzzled. “Sonia?”

  I nodded. Looking past him, I said, “Did you order a pizza?” A man was shifting a pizza box from one arm to the other to ring the buzzer at Owen’s door.

  “Oh, shit, hang on,” Owen said, and ran, yelling, “Wait, wait!”

  When I caught up with him he was standing there with the pizza box, grinning sheepishly. “I didn’t want him to wake the baby,” he said. “Did you know I had a baby?” When I nodded, he said, “I didn’t realize my whole world would revolve around getting him to sleep.” He studied me. “Wow,” he said. “Cameron. Do you want to come in?”

  It was a small, sunny apartment—one bedroom, galley kitchen, bathroom, narrow living room, and a tiny alcove with floor-to-ceiling shelves of CDs. The living room was full of baby paraphernalia. Stuffed animals lined the mantelpiece. The baby himself, a tiny pink creature, was asleep in his carrier, nothing visible but his face and one balled-up hand.

  Owen’s wife was named Anna. She was a pixie of a woman, with a small frame and a sprightly air. She wore her fine blond hair cut short, and I could have sworn her ears were slightly pointed. When Owen introduced us, she hugged me. I patted her gently on the back, feeling like a giant who’d been handed a piece of delicate china.

  After I’d admired the apartment and the baby, Anna asked what I was doing in New York, and I repeated that I was looking for Sonia. They hadn’t seen her lately, though she’d stayed a night with them a couple months ago. I told the story about the package and summarized my search for her, though I lied about why I’d thought she might be there. I said I’d seen the birth announcement and surmised she’d come to see the baby. I wondered how much Anna knew about Sonia and about why Owen had broken up with me. Or rather, why I had broken up with him. I supposed I had been the one to end our relationship. Funny how I tended to think of it the other way around. If Owen had told her, he must have offered some explanation, to assure her that nothing of the kind would ever happen to her. I wondered if that explanation had been “I was young, I was drunk,” or if it had been something better, something that would be worth hearing now.

  Anna and I sat on the futon while Owen fetched glasses of water from the kitchen. I admired the baby again. “He looks just like Owen, don’t you think?” Anna said, and I agreed that he did, although it was hard to tell. When Owen appeared, handing us our glasses and then sitting on the other side of Anna—there was no other place to sit in the small room—Anna smiled at him and patted his thigh. She left her hand there as she said, “I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been telling Owen for a long time he should track you down. He still feels guilty about what he did to you.”

  I flushed, and glancing at Owen I saw that he had flushed, too. That answered the question of whether he’d told her. “Anna,” he said.

  “What?” She made a guilty face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have an honesty defect.”

  “It’s okay.” I couldn’t decide whether to be affronted or amused.

  “Owen wishes he could put a filter in me.” She smiled. “But,” she added in a teasing tone, “it’s what he loves about me, too.” She turned to him. “Admit it!”

  He gave her a mock frown, shaking his head, his cheeks still pink. “I admit nothing,” he said.

  “I’m really sorry.” She held up her hands. “Let’s blame the hormones. Or the sleep deprivation! Let’s blame that.”

  “It’s okay.” I caught Owen’s eye and looked away. “It’s really okay. It was a long time ago. Let’s talk about the baby.”

  “You might be sorry,” Anna said. “I can talk about the baby a long time.”

  The baby’s name was Emmet. He was five weeks old that day. He’d been colicky, but now he was sleeping more and more, to Anna’s great relief. Anna coordinated educational programs for a museum, but was on maternity leave for another two months. Owen was a music publicist. He listed some of his clients, and I was impressed—I’d heard of several of them. They’d been married for three years. They’d met at a wedding—one of Owen’s co-workers had married Anna’s best friend. I asked question after question, hoping to distract them from asking any of me. In the back of my mind I heard Anna saying, “He still feels guilty about what he did to you.” Watching Anna’s mobile features as she talked, I wondered how any man who’d once loved me had ended up with this
sweet, open person who seemed incapable of lying. I had always assumed some common thread connected all the people you chose to love, but if there was one between me and Anna I had no idea what it was.

  Emmet woke and started screaming. It had been some time since I’d heard a newborn cry. I’d forgotten how desperate you became to give him what he wanted. It wasn’t time for him to eat, but after bouncing him and trying all manner of toys, Anna sighed and said she’d better nurse him. “Take Cameron out for a beer,” she said. “Then you guys can talk.” Owen gave her a look, and she turned to me. “I’m sorry,” she said over Emmet’s cries. “I just can’t help myself.”

  We went to a bar across the street, a dark pub-style place with a pool table and no one but the bartender inside. We made awkward chitchat, Anna’s comments still in the air between us as we sat down with our beers. “I can’t believe you’re a father,” I said.

  “Me neither,” he said. “It’s weird, though. Anna seems like a mother now, and she didn’t before.”

  “She wasn’t before.”

  He laughed. “True.”

  “I guess we’re grown-ups.”

  “More or less,” he said. He clinked his beer against mine.

  Halfway into the second beer, I said that Anna and I seemed very different.

  “In appearance, maybe,” he said, like he’d already given the matter some thought. “But you’re both romantics. You think that everything is connected somehow. You think everything means something.”

  “I’m not a romantic.” Irritated, I mopped at the wet circles my beer had left on the table.

  “Well, you used to be,” he said. “The way you were at the paper—convinced every story was so important.” He shaped headlines in the air with his hands. “CORRUPTION IN FOOD SERVICES. THE STUDENT BODY PRESIDENT’S ILLEGAL PARKING PASS.”

  “Hey,” I said. “That was crucial stuff.”

  “And you cried the first time we . . .” He stopped. “I’m sorry. Anna’s rubbing off on me.”

  “No more beer for you,” I said, pulling his empty bottle to my side of the table. “And I didn’t cry.”

  “You did so.” He looked indignant. “Remember? You were so embarrassed that you were crying; you just sat there with your hands over your face.”

  I thought of him trying to tug my hands away, his voice, half laughing, half worried, as he said, “This is happy crying, right?”

  Now he leaned forward and said in a whisper, “I lost my virginity to you.”

  “I dimly recall that.”

  He shook his head at the memory. “I was pathetic. How many condoms did I throw away, thinking I hadn’t unrolled them right?”

  “About four hundred,” I said. “I, of course, was only pretending inexperience to set you at ease. I’d been with a thousand sailors, a movie star or two.”

  He gave me a half-smile. “I better get us another round,” he said. He refused to take my money. I watched him leaning on the bar, saying something to the bartender that made him laugh, leaving the bartender a three-dollar tip. I had forgotten how much I liked him, in all the confusion over his breaking my heart.

  I drank some of the fresh beer, for bravery, and then I said, “You were sweet. I’m glad it was you.”

  “Thanks,” he said, his eyes serious. “I mean, really. Thanks. I was afraid I’d made you regret everything.”

  “Only some things,” I said.

  “I want to ask you . . .” He dropped his gaze to the table, running his finger along a crack in the wood. “If you’re not a romantic anymore, is that because of me? Is that my fault?”

  I laughed. “Are you asking me if you ruined my life?”

  “Not ruined, exactly.” He shot me a look. “Affected.”

  Part of me wanted to take this line of questioning as arrogance, but I knew that wasn’t what he meant. “I don’t know,” I said. “You’re the closest I’ve come to permanent, unless you want to count Oliver.”

  “Who’s Oliver?”

  I was sorry I’d mentioned his name. “He was my boss. It was complicated.”

  He nodded and muttered into the table, “Say no more.”

  I waited until he looked up. “I’m not saying I wanted to marry you.”

  He held up both hands, palms out. “Hey,” he said. “I’d never presume.”

  The front door opened, and we both turned to see two young men come in, laughing and noisy. They got drinks and went to play a game of pool. Owen said, “For a long time I was worried I was a bad person. I was afraid any relationship I got in, I’d fuck it up, because it doesn’t take that much to fuck it up. Then I fell for this girl—before Anna—and after we’d been dating about a year I found out she was cheating on me.”

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “I tried to be understanding—you know, didn’t want to be a hypocrite—but it was over pretty quick. That’s not the point, though. The point is, that’s when I stopped feeling bad about myself and started thinking about how you must have felt. Well, okay, I didn’t stop feeling bad about myself. But when I told you that what happened with Sonia meant nothing, it was true. It did mean nothing. But when Lizzie said that to me, I couldn’t believe it. Because of course it meant something to me.”

  At the pool table, one of the guys said, “Fuck!”

  “Oh, ho,” the other guy said.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked.

  Owen looked away. “Oh, I don’t know. All the usual reasons.” He lifted one shoulder and dropped it. “I’d feel stupid listing them for you. They’re true, but so inadequate.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, why did you choose her? Why did you choose her over me?”

  “I didn’t choose her,” he said. “I know why it felt like that. But I loved you. I chose you. I would have always chosen you.” He grinned. “If I chose Sonia, it was for like fifteen minutes.”

  “Or fifteen seconds,” I said, grinning back.

  “Hey now,” he said. “Not when I’m being confessional.”

  I sat back. “There’s no such thing as permanent anyway.”

  “Well, I hope that’s not true,” he said.

  “Sorry. I mean except for you and Anna.”

  “Except for us.” He said, somewhere between joking and earnest, “I wish there were some way to make you a romantic again.”

  “I am who I am,” I said. I hadn’t meant to sound like I was sad about that.

  We went back to the apartment. The living room was empty. I started to speak, and Owen put his finger to his lips. He tiptoed to the closed bedroom door, then waved me over. I could hear Anna on the other side, singing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” making an effort to push her sweet, slightly off-key voice toward Dylan’s rough cadences. “That’s a lullaby?” I whispered.

  Owen smiled. “In our world,” he said.

  I looked at the expression on his face—the tenderness in it, the pride—and felt at the same time a new affection for him and a physical sense of the distance between who we had once been to each other and who we were now. I couldn’t imagine that only Sonia had prevented me from being the woman holding his baby on the other side of the door. Owen was a nice person. I liked him and his wife, and I thought from now on we’d probably exchange Christmas cards and have dinner on the rare occasions we were in the same town. But just as Oliver’s things lost their meaning without Oliver, so without the love I used to feel for Owen, he’d lost his meaning for me. He used to be the hero of the story, but now he was just an average person again. I thought of Will, the one my feelings put the spotlight on now, and then I tried not to think of him.

  Owen guided me back to the living room, so that Anna wouldn’t catch us eavesdropping. “She’s embarrassed about her singing,” he whispered.

  “Another thing we have in common,” I said.

  When Anna emerged with Emmet, saying he wouldn’t sleep, I asked to hold him. He stared at me with that expression newborns have that suggests they’re perplexed and angry to f
ind themselves in a bright world of hard surfaces and hunger. “He really does look like Owen,” I said, and Anna beamed. Owen put his arm around her and kissed her on the temple, and Anna said I had to stay for dinner.

  As the evening wore on, I began to say that I should go, although Anna protested every time. We watched Emmet fall asleep in his swing. Anna offered to make me a bed on the futon, but I lied and said I was on my way to Connecticut to see some friends. I thought I’d drive until I got tired, and then I’d find another motel. I’d decide which way to go once I got on the highway. There was no place else for me to look for Sonia, and I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to Cambridge to leave the package. I’d have to mail it. Oliver would have to understand that I’d done my best.

  Determined to leave, I was saying my final good-byes when the buzzer rang. Owen and Anna looked at the sleeping baby, but he didn’t stir. Together they sighed with relief. “I’ll get it,” Owen said.

  Anna watched him go, radiating anticipation. “Who is it?” I asked, but she just shrugged.

  After a moment Owen came back, wearing a puzzled frown. “Weird,” he said. “It’s Will Barrett.”

  “Finally,” Anna said, and Owen and I looked at her. She smiled with guilt and excitement. I stood up, and she put a hand on my arm. “He called while you were out,” she said. “He said you’d leave if you knew he was coming.”

  “He was right,” I said.

  “But it’s so romantic,” she said. “He drove all this way.”

  I looked down into her bright, hopeful eyes. “I can’t,” I said.

  I went for the door. Owen was right behind me. “What’s going on?” he asked. Eight years ago I’d packed my things while he followed me around his house with tears in his eyes, saying again and again that he loved me. I’d kept my resolution to leave him without a word.

  “Déjà vu,” I said. I opened the door and caught Will with his hand raised to knock. “I’m sorry,” I said to Owen, and then brushed past Will and ran down the stairs. I heard Will pounding after me, but I made it to the street before he grabbed me by the arm.