“Oh, Lu,” Jason said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I just . . . well . . . I know we haven’t talked about relationships before, but remember when Jocelyn and I broke up for the last time?”
I don’t know if you and I ever talked about Jocelyn, but she was Jay’s girlfriend in college and right afterward. They met their sophomore year at Princeton and kept getting together and breaking up over and over for five years—until finally she decided to go to medical school at Stanford, and after a brief attempt at long distance they broke up for good. I guess their five years has nothing on our . . . how should I calculate it now . . . thirteen? Eleven?
“I remember,” I said to Jay, even though I only half did. I was in college at the time and so wrapped up in my own world that I hadn’t really been all that involved in my brother’s.
“The reason I was able to end things for good is that I realized that we were like the gummy bear experiment. Do you remember that one? I think I showed it to you in the lab when you came to visit me at college my freshman year. You put potassium chlorate in a test tube and then add a gummy bear, and these two items that are perfectly fine on their own explode. Every single time. Jocelyn and I were like that experiment. Every time we were together we would explode, and it was exciting and wonderful in some ways, but who wants to live with constant explosions?”
“Mm-hm,” I answered, thinking of you and me. We didn’t break up and get back together over and over, but our relationship back then did feel exciting and wonderful. We were better together than each of us was on our own.
“Anyway, when I met Vanessa, it was different. It was like . . . it was like the Old Nassau experiment. Do you remember that one? It starts out with three clear solutions, but you mix two together first, so I imagine I’m those two mixed solutions, and then when you add the third, nothing happens at first, but then the solution turns orange because of the potassium iodate and then a little while later, it turns color again, this time to black, which you know is my favorite color, because it’s the one that contains all the pigment there is, and then it stays that way.”
He stopped. I was silent. I had no clue how to respond.
“Basically, what I’m saying, Lu, is that the relationship got better the longer it lasted. Instead of that gummy bear explosion, it’s a clock reaction. Do you understand what I mean?”
I didn’t understand then, though I do now. Darren showed me that. Though he’d probably say love is like a fine wine, where flavors deepen and change over time. All I said to Jason then was, “But I love him so much, Jay.”
“I know,” he said. “I loved Jocelyn too. I still do. Probably I always will a little bit. But I love Vanessa—differently. What I wanted to tell you is that there are lots of ways to love people and I know that you’ll love someone else again. Even if it’s not the same, some of it might be better.”
“I don’t want to,” I whispered. I wanted to love only you. And I couldn’t imagine anything could be better than that.
Jason was quiet for a moment. “Maybe it was too soon for me to say that,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m not that good at this sort of thing. But maybe . . . what I said will make its way into your neurons and you’ll remember it when you need it most.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Thanks for calling.”
“I love you, Lucy, like hydrogen loves oxygen. A totally different kind of love. An elemental kind.”
And when he said that, I laughed through my tears because only my brother could explain love using the periodic table.
xxiv
Alexis dragged me all over that summer. To bars, to concerts, to parties, to movie screenings. We dressed up every night, in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Southampton, and with enough martinis, I could forget for a little bit.
Kate took me to her parents’ place on Cape Cod for a week, leaving Tom back in Manhattan. She pampered me with spa treatments and took me to a salon for a brand-new haircut she’d found in a French fashion magazine her sister sent. That’s when I cut off my braid and donated my hair.
Julia told me she was on Team Lucy and that she’d be there whenever I needed her. We spent a lot of nights together eating macaroni and cheese, since you hated it, and watching the most violent action films we could find.
My friends were actually pretty amazing, considering how much they hated you at that point. I don’t know if Kate or Alexis has ever forgiven you for leaving me. Julia has, but it took her a while to understand what you and I had together—until your gallery show.
My mom sent me text messages all day long. And inspirational articles in the mail.
Jason came to visit, treating me to a Brooklyn Cyclones game, and hot dogs, and an explosion using Diet Coke and Mentos.
Practically everyone I knew tried to cheer me up in every way they knew how. And I tried as hard as I could to get over you, but really the only thing I needed was time.
xxv
At the end of that summer, about two weeks after I got your e-mail and created my Disaster folder, I met Darren.
Does it bother you that I’m talking about him? I’m sorry if it does, but he’s part of our story too. As much as you might not like it—might not like him—our road wouldn’t be the same without Darren.
I woke up to make coffee the last weekend of my Hamptons share, Labor Day weekend, and he was sleeping on the couch in the middle of our living room. I’d never seen him before. He certainly hadn’t been there when I’d gone to bed. Still, Alexis’s friend Sabrina tended to bring groups of people back to the house, and it wasn’t a surprise to find them sleeping on couches or chairs or sometimes even on the floor in the living room.
I tiptoed around him and headed into the kitchen to make some coffee for the house. After you left, my whole sleep pattern changed. The minute I woke up, no matter how early, no matter how hungover, I got out of bed, because lying there without you was an exercise in misery. So coffee had become my job that summer.
The house was always full of people, and I tried not to look too much like I’d just rolled out of bed. That morning I’d thrown on a bikini—my favorite that summer was a red bandeau—with a pair of cutoff shorts. And I’d tied a bandana around my hair, letting the side-swept bangs hang over my left eye. I was tan from all those Hamptons weekends, and the bike rides to the beach had toned my body more than I’d expected them to. I liked what I saw when I looked in the mirror that summer. I had to stop myself often from wondering what you’d think if you saw me—if you’d like it too.
By the time the coffee machine started percolating, Darren had woken up. He walked into the kitchen and greeted me with the worst attempt at a pickup line I’d ever heard. Or maybe it wasn’t even supposed to be a pickup line. He’s never admitted one way or the other. Regardless, it was the sort of ridiculous thing that you would never say.
“Have I died and gone to caffeine heaven?” he asked. “Because you seem like a coffee angel.”
It did make me smile, though.
His hair was pin-straight, but it was sticking up on one side, where it had been crushed against the arm of the couch. And he was wearing boxer briefs and a T-shirt that said New Jersey: Only the Strong Survive. I couldn’t help but wonder where the rest of his clothing had gone.
I handed him the first cup of coffee and he took a sip.
“I’m no angel,” I told him. “I promise. I’m Lucy.”
“Darren,” he said, holding out his hand. “This coffee is fantastic.”
“I ground the beans yesterday,” I told him. “They’re from that new fair-trade coffee place in town.”
He took another sip. “Your boyfriend is one lucky guy,” he said, “dating a girl who can make coffee like this.”
I couldn’t help it, tears pricked my eyes as I said, “No boyfriend.”
“Really,” he said, drinking more coffee, his eyes finding mine over the rim of the mug.
I compared him to you then. His straight hair to your curly. His short, muscular frame to your long, lean one. His brown eyes to your blue. I knew he wanted to flirt, but I couldn’t do it.
“I’m gonna go get my stuff together for the beach,” I told him. “If you leave before I come out of my room again, it was nice to meet you.”
He nodded and lifted his mug. “Thanks for the coffee, Lucy,” he said.
xxvi
He left before I came out of my room again. Or rather, I didn’t come out of my room until I heard him and his friend leave. But he must have asked Sabrina about me, because I got a Friendster request from him the next day. And a message asking for the name of the fair-trade coffee bean store.
We bantered a little through messages, and he invited me to a coffee-and-chocolate pairing event he’d read about in Park Slope. It was a Sunday afternoon, which somehow felt safe and non-date-y, and I had nothing else to do, so I went.
It would be a lie to say I didn’t think about you at all. In fact, I thought about you a lot. But interspersed, there were moments of fun. Of jokes. Of coffee almost coming out of Darren’s nose because he was laughing so hard at one of the descriptions of the pairings. It was the best time I’d had in months. Well, the best time I’d had in months sober.
So when he asked me out for dinner a week later, I said yes. He wasn’t you, but he was clever, he was handsome, he made me laugh . . . he wanted me. And he made me forget about you, at least for a little while.
xxvii
Darren insisted on picking me up at my apartment for our date. He was wearing a suit and his hair was combed back, away from his face. I’d worn a summer dress to work that day—it was new, yellow-and-white seersucker—and I was still wearing it, with a pair of sandals, but he seemed much dressier than I was.
He must’ve seen me looking at his suit, because he said, “I-banker’s uniform. I didn’t have time to change.”
I smiled. “You look nice in a suit.” As I said it, I realized he did. His shoulders were broader than his waist, and the suit was perfectly tailored to accentuate that fact.
I almost offered to change into something fancier, but before I had the chance he said, “You look nicer in that dress. In fact, I’d bet if we took a poll of completely objective humans about the niceness factor of our respective outfits, you’d win.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Niceness factor of our respective outfits?” I repeated.
“That’s the technical term,” he said.
He wasn’t you. He absolutely wasn’t you. He was older, for one thing, twenty-nine. And he was calmer, grounded. Solid, Julia called him. And he was the only one who’d been able to make me laugh since you left. That counted for a lot.
When he crooked his elbow and said, “Mademoiselle?” I linked my arm with his and closed my apartment door behind me. I was actually looking forward to dinner with him.
xxviii
After dinner that night, Darren said he would walk me home, that it was the gentlemanly thing to do. He even walked on the street side of the sidewalk, so he would block me in the event that a car came zooming down the street and splashed through a puddle. It would drench him and not me, he explained.
“I see,” I told him. “What about ladies? What are we supposed to do?”
“Nothing you’re not already doing,” he said, which made me smile again.
Then he cleared his throat. “You know, I was a tour guide at Penn and happen to be qualified to give tours of Prospect Heights as well.”
“Oh really?” I asked, not quite sure if he was joking.
He began talking in an upper-crust accent, like maybe he was someone who had donated a building to a university. I immediately started laughing. He sounded like I imagined the Schermerhorns or the Havermeyers or the Hartleys did, those families that had buildings named after them on campus. I always wondered about them when we were at school. I pictured them living in huge mansions in someplace like Armonk and summering on Martha’s Vineyard. Mr. Schermerhorn wore those red pants that everyone wears on Nantucket and had a perma-tan and an underbite. And Mrs. Havermeyer never left the house without three-carat diamonds in each ear. She had three children who were raised by three different nannies, who shaped each of their personalities quite differently. She was oddly obsessed with the number three. And the Hartleys had show dogs. Corgis, like the queen of England.
I guess I could probably find out about them online now, if I wanted, but that would ruin the stories I made up in my head. I haven’t thought about those stories in years.
So Darren turned to me and, in a voice like a Schermerhorn, said, “That large brownstone is the home of Ashton Cranston Wellington Leeds the Fourth, of the Kensington Leedses. The nobler side of the family. Everyone knows the Glasgow Leedses are gamblers and crooks. And horse thieves. They use teaspoons for their soup and dinner forks for dessert. Utter blasphemy. In fact, there’s been a movement to hyphenate the family name to Kensington-Leeds. You know, for the sake of disambiguation.”
I laughed so hard at that one I almost snorted, which made me laugh even more.
He kept going in his Schermerhorn voice. “I’ve heard that’s why Julia Louis-Dreyfus hyphenated. Those other Dreyfuses were terrible. Same with Wal-Mart. Those other Marts? Forget about it. Disambiguation is very important.”
Every time I tried to respond, my words were broken up with giggles. Then Darren and I rounded the corner toward my apartment. He stopped in front of my building. I stopped too. The laughter died in my throat when I saw the way he looked at me. He was going to kiss me. Panic constricted my lungs.
I hadn’t kissed anyone since you left.
I hadn’t wanted to kiss anyone since you left.
“I . . .” I started, but I didn’t quite know where to go with that.
Darren must’ve seen the look on my face, though, and instead of kissing my lips, he leaned forward and kissed my forehead.
“Thanks for a really fun night,” he said. “I hope we can do it again.”
I nodded, and he smiled.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
I could breathe again.
“I’d like that,” I answered. Because I did have a fun night with him. And because it was better to spend time with him than to sit home, alone, or get trashed with Alexis.
And as he walked away, I realized I was disappointed that he was leaving. My world seemed a little brighter while he shared it with me, and I liked that. A lot.
Then I turned to walk into my apartment and thought again about you.
xxix
The next day I spoke to Alexis. “What did you tell Darren about me?” I asked her.
“Me?” she said. “Nothing.”
I sighed. I’d been going over the forehead kiss in my mind all morning, and I realized that someone must’ve said something. Someone must’ve told him not to move too fast.
“Okay, not you,” I said. “Sabrina? What did she tell him?”
Alexis took a deep breath. I could imagine her running her hand through her hair on the other side of the phone. I haven’t seen her in about a year, since my last work trip to LA. She was such a huge part of my world back then, and just . . . isn’t anymore. It’s kind of sad that I don’t really miss her. I guess people change, lives change. We know that better than anybody.
“She told him you just got out of something serious,” Alexis said over the phone. “She told him to be patient. Not to break you.”
I cringed, even though Sabrina was probably right in saying all those things.
“And what did he say?” I asked.
“He said not only would he not break you, that he’d help put you back together.”
I leaned my head against the back of my couch. “Well,” I said. “That’s bold. What’s his deal? Does he have some sort of savior complex? A need to be a hero?”
�
�He’s really a good guy,” Alexis told me. “His friends are pretty much asshats, but he’s really decent. Not that Gabe wasn’t, but . . . I guess I’m just saying . . . give him a shot, Lu.”
I felt tears welling up in my eyes again at the mention of your name. I needed to stop that from happening, but I had no idea how.
“I don’t know if I can,” I said, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.
“It takes a guy to get over a guy,” Alexis said then. “And believe me, I should know.”
I let out a short burst of sound that was caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
“Seriously,” Alexis said, “give him a chance. If nothing else, he’ll show you that there are other good, smart people out there who think you’re pretty great.”
I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. “I’ll give him a chance,” I told her.
“Nothing more I can ask for,” she said. “Except maybe plans for next Friday night? You know that hot guy I met on the L train? He’s in a piece of performance art on the Lower East Side. Can you go with me?”
“Is this the one with the green hair?” I asked.
“Ew, no,” Alexis said. “Did I not tell you? He picked his nose at dinner. Done. This is the one with the Buddy Holly glasses and the beard.”
“Got it,” I said. “Count me in.” Even though really the last thing I wanted to do was go to see performance art starring some wacko Alexis met on the subway. But it was better than missing you.
xxx
Darren didn’t try to kiss me again. Not the next time we hung out, not the time after that, not the time after that either. And then it was almost Halloween.
“Want to come with me to a Halloween party this weekend?” he asked, when he called me a few days after our last date. “I promise it’ll be fun.”
The Light We Lost Page 7