True Love (and Other Lies)

by Whitney Gaskell

  “I couldn’t care less about her feelings. I’m worried about yours,” Max said, peering intently at me over the rim of his MoMA coffee mug.

  “Why?”

  “You’re incapable of having a fling. You’re just not wired that way. I know you’re getting emotionally involved with this guy,” Max said. The sharp features of his face were serious and his voice was somber. It was a state I rarely saw him in, although his Obi-Wan Kenobi routine—the wise counselor dispensing advice—was a little undermined by the fact that his hair was sticking straight up, like a bird’s ruffled feathers. He looked like a little kid who had just rolled out of bed, groggy and unkempt, and I had to stifle an impulse to smooth his cowlicks down.

  “And what if I am? I thought you were always telling me I needed to loosen up, to live on the wild side. And here I am, proposing to do just that, and now you’re telling me not to risk it,” I complained.

  “I’m allowed to be fickle. You’re my best friend, and I don’t want to see you get into a bad situation,” Max said.

  “I know what you’re worried about, but I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself,” I said, standing up and stretching. I began to gather up the dirty dishes.

  “Can you?” Max asked.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, exasperated. I dumped the dishes into the sink of my tiny kitchenette and returned with the last of the coffee to refill our two mugs.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you, but you have to promise you won’t get mad,” Max began.

  “I hate it when people say that. It means you’re about to insult me,” I muttered.

  “No, I’m not. I just want you to face facts. Because the truth is, you’re just not the type to run around behind your friend’s back,” Max said.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You don’t even like Maddy.”

  “No, I don’t, but you do. You love her like a sister, at least that’s what you’ve always told me. And from what you’ve said, this breakup has really thrown her. So when she finds out about you and Jack—and she will find out if you keep this up—she’s never going to forgive you. You know it’s true. You can hardly forgive yourself, for God’s sake,” Max said. “And I don’t think that you’re going to be able to live with the consequences.”

  I fidgeted. It was true. The guilt had been weighing rather heavily on my mind, so much so that I was being plagued by yet another bout of insomnia. Even my usual cure—reading a biography until I fall asleep from sheer boredom—hadn’t worked, and I now knew far more about the life of John Adams than I’d ever thought possible. I’d been dragging myself around the office looking like complete hell, yawning my way through staff meetings, and had yet to turn in my London column. It was so bad that the last few times Robert had made noises about firing me, I almost believed him.

  And the thing was, no matter how much I loved hearing Jack’s voice, or how well we seemed to fit together, the strange and wonderful relationship still had a taint to it. The feeling that I was doing something I shouldn’t was constantly gnawing at me. It was just like the time when I cut school and had a Ferris Bueller–style day off with my friends, lying out in the sun and painting our toenails, and instead of fully kicking back and reveling in the beauty of being free for a day, I spent the entire time worrying that I was going to get caught.

  “Well, when I first met Jack, when we first, um . . .” I hesitated.

  “Did it,” Max prompted.

  I glared at him. “When we first went out, I didn’t know that he and Maddy even knew each other. It wasn’t like I set out to stab her in the back,” I said defensively.

  “No. And no one could blame you for what—or should I say who—you did. And I don’t even think it was that big of a deal for you to see him that night after you knew. It gave you a chance to say good-bye, to see the fling through to its logical conclusion. But then he came here to visit you, and you’ve continued to stay in contact with him, and now you’re thinking about going back over there to see him. It’s gone way past a fling,” Max said.

  “What if I tell her now?” I asked. “Before I leave. I’ll call her, and tell her everything—well, not everything—but I’ll tell her the basics. Fair enough?”

  Max shrugged. “I guess. But don’t expect her to give you her blessing. She’ll never do it,” he said.

  “She might. It’s been a while since they broke up. She bounces back pretty quickly from relationships, or at least she used to before Jack,” I argued.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Max said. But his tone of voice made it clear that he didn’t think so.

  And I didn’t add what I was thinking, which was that even if I did work up the nerve to tell Maddy about my relationship with Jack, and even if she did ask me to end things with him, or worse, threatened to end our friendship over it, I wasn’t so sure anymore that it was enough to keep me away from Jack. For right or wrong, I’d fallen for him. It scared me, and yet despite my fear, I couldn’t seem to stay away from him. My favorite part of every day had become those precious moments that I got to talk to him. Snuggled up in my favorite flannel pajamas, with my down comforter wrapped around me, I’d hold the phone to my ear, listen to the warm rumble of his voice, and feel completely whole. Even though I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff, flirting with falling over and breaking into a thousand bloody bits, I still couldn’t stay away.

  “Enough about me. What’s going on with you and Daphne?”

  Max feigned innocence. “Why do you think something’s going on?”

  “Because you’re acting sketchy every time I mention her name. And she didn’t say anything about going to Philly when we had dinner the other night.”

  During dinner I hadn’t noticed anything amiss between Max and Daphne, but now that I thought back, they had both spent more time talking to me than they did to each other. Which wasn’t at all like them.

  Max shrugged. It seemed to be his stock response lately whenever I asked him about Daphne. “It’s nothing,” he insisted, in a tone that made it clear he wasn’t going to divulge anything.

  “Fine, don’t tell me,” I said childishly. “I pour my heart out to you, and you hold out on me.”

  “I said, it’s nothing,” he repeated. “Daffy just needed a little time on her own. She’s taking the train back tonight.”

  I raised my eyebrows questioningly, but he just shrugged yet again, and stared moodily at his coffee.

  I hoped this was just a hiccup, and not a serious problem with their relationship. I was still at the stage of needing relationship-training wheels, so a solid couple like Max and Daphne had always been an inspiration to me.

  I put off calling Maddy for a few hours. First, I went to the gym, and pounded out my stress and anxiety on the treadmill for forty-five minutes, and then did a quick set of reps on the Nautilus equipment. I love my gym—it lacks the meat market scene that most have. It has the obligatory weirdo or two, standard at all gyms—the leathery-skinned woman who spends eight solid hours a day on the Stairmaster, the middle-aged guy who does some kind of strange arm-flapping routine while walking on the treadmill. But everyone pretty much keeps to him- or herself, reading magazines or listening to headphones. I’ve caught a few accountant-looking types checking out the buns of some lawyer-looking types, but it’s usually done discreetly and with a definite lack of cheesy pick-up lines. Even better, unlike most gyms, where the aerobics instructors are all perky and blonde and have names that end in “i”—Kimmi, Lori, Jenni—the instructors at my gym are mostly male and resemble army drill instructors in both looks and demeanor, so I don’t have to spend step class feeling insecure about the fact that my arms are larger than the instructor’s thighs.

  After I returned home and showered, I stripped the sheets off my bed and hauled my laundry downstairs to run a few loads through. Then I ducked out to the store to stock up on skim milk, cereal, and bottled water. In a last-ditch effort to put off calling Maddy, I even resorted to cleaning my apar
tment from top to bottom, but considering that it’s only about five hundred square feet, even dusting, sweeping, and scrubbing every surface didn’t take very long.

  After finally running out of errands to do, I picked up the handset to my cordless phone and tapped it against my cheek, rehearsing what I’d say to Maddy and trying to anticipate what her reaction would be to “Hi, it’s me, I’m the one sleeping with your ex-boyfriend. Sorry.” Somehow, I couldn’t quite picture her shrugging, tossing her glossy black sheet of hair back, and replying “No biggie.” I was guessing it would more likely fall between tearful recriminations and shrieks of anger, and neither scenario sounded like a whole lot of fun.

  When the apprehension over calling became worse than my direst predictions of how I thought the actual call would go, I finally broke down and punched Maddy’s long, foreign phone number into my phone. The entire time I dialed, my hands were shaking, and my stomach had the same sickly, acidic feeling that usually follows a serious espresso binge. The phone rang, and rang, and then rang again, and for a minute the clouds parted and sunshine began leaking through at the very thought that I might have even a short reprieve from the unpleasant task of kicking in my friend’s already broken heart. But then there was a click, and rather than being followed by the tinny recorded message of her answering machine, Maddy’s breathless voice was there.

  “Hello,” she answered.

  “Hey, it’s me. Didn’t you get my message?” I asked.

  “Hey. Yeah. Sorry. I’ve been meaning to call you back. I just . . . haven’t had the energy to, I guess,” Maddy said, and my heart sank.

  This was going to be even worse than I’d thought. She sounded terribly down, and not just with the Sunday, I-don’t-want-to-go-to-work-tomorrow blues. Her sadness was more like the kind of gut-tearing dejection that likely inspired Rod Stewart when he wrote his breakup anthems. I kept hoping that she would meet someone new, or have some big triumph at work, something to make her feel better. Not only to make it easier to tell her about Jack and me, but because I knew how it feels to spend a post-breakup Sunday alternating between watching old movies on cable and weeping softly. And now, with what I had to tell her, I was going to demolish her even further. There was no doubt that she was going to hate me. Hell, I hated me for what I was about to do to her.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

  “Same old same old,” she said, and then sighed. “But I know that you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about Harrison.”

  “No, it’s not that I don’t want to hear about it. About, um, him. It’s just that . . . well, I’m worried about you. I mean, the last time we talked you sounded a little unhinged. You were talking about hiring a private investigator,” I pointed out.

  “I don’t think it’s such a crazy idea,” Maddy huffed. Then she paused, and I heard the click of a lighter and a deep inhale of breath.

  “Are you smoking again?” I asked, surprised.

  “No, not really. Only occasionally,” she said, and then she inhaled again. Her inhale was such a satisfied sigh that I could practically taste the wonderful earthy flavor of the tobacco, to feel my lungs expand with the relaxing cloud of smoke, and just like that, ten years of abstinence and willpower almost disappeared. I could almost smell the cigarettes, fresh out of the box, just after the foil wrapper’s been ripped off.

  Maddy and I had both chain-smoked our way through college—a Marlboro Light being the perfect accompaniment to a cup of coffee and gossip session—but had each given it up at about the same time we began to embrace sunscreen. In fact, Maddy had quit months before I did, and had been incredibly irritating with her superior smiles and disapproving head shakes every time I pulled out a cigarette. And now she’d started up again? After all the lectures she had given me on the evils of nicotine, after all of the badgering about how much cleaner her lungs felt since she’d quit, about how wrinkled my skin would be if I kept it up? In fact, that was what had motivated her into quitting. Maddy had given up cold turkey when she supposedly spotted a wrinkle at the edge of her mouth, although the supposedly offending patch of skin looked to me as creamily perfect as that on the rest of her face.

  I, on the other hand, was able to quit only after multiple relapses and finally a six-week period spent on the patch, a time during which I became so bitchy that I was liable to fly into a rage if I thought that someone on the subway was looking at me in a vaguely critical way. Even now, just hearing the tempting sound of Maddy’s self-satisfied puffs gripped me with a fierce desire to run down to the corner Korean market and snatch up as many cartons as I could carry out. And then a thought occurred to me. Sure, it might be a cliché, but there was one circumstance in which I’d known Maddy to occasionally break from her self-imposed prohibition on smoking. . . .

  “Did you just have sex?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Why do you sound so surprised? It has been known to happen from time to time,” Maddy said.

  “But . . . but . . . with whom? I mean . . . I thought you were upset about, um, Harrison,” I said, and all thoughts of smoking fled my mind, only to be replaced by a beacon of hope. If Maddy was sleeping with someone else, then surely she had to be close to getting over Jack. And if she was over him, then maybe she wouldn’t mind quite so much that I’d started seeing him. She’d probably still be upset—even though I was long since over Sawyer, I didn’t relish the idea of his ending up with one of my friends—but maybe it would make my news less devastating.

  “I am. But that doesn’t mean I can’t see other men,” she said. “Especially someone I care about.”

  “No, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. The best way to get over a guy is to get out there and meet someone new, right?” I enthused.

  “This isn’t someone new.” Maddy exhaled smoke and sighed at the same time, which made for a long, lugubrious hiss. “Look, I suppose I should have told you this before, but I know how you are, and I wasn’t up for being judged.”

  “I’m not judgmental,” I said, immediately affronted.

  “Yes, you are. I love you, but you are, Claire. You know it’s true. And you’ll definitely judge me for this. I’ve, well . . . I’ve been seeing my boss,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know if that’s smart office politics, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a moral dilemma,” I said, still feeling stung by the casual insult. Especially since it’s judgmental to call someone judgmental. Besides, just because I can look at an issue and objectively form decisions about what is right and wrong with it, doesn’t mean I’m judgmental. Does it?

  “It is if he’s married,” Maddy said.

  My apartment suddenly seemed unbearably small. It was ridiculous, because my apartment was minuscule, and always had been—there are RVs that are roomier than my pad. I’d always kind of liked it that way, especially since I can vacuum the entire apartment in ninety seconds flat. But now the tiny space felt claustrophobic, and made me want to stick my head out of the window to suck in some not-so-fresh air and relieve the ringing in my ears, the pain in my chest, the shortness of breath.

  I was agape at Maddy’s confession. I mean that literally—upon hearing her words, my mouth actually dropped open, and I fell back against the back of my couch, stunned. I just couldn’t believe it. Maddy was seeing a married man? After all of the pain that I’d gone through dealing with my own philandering father, a festering hurt that she’d been a firsthand witness to? I could now see why she hadn’t told me before—she’d known exactly how I’d feel about it. Adultery was an issue that I had strong opinions on . . . and none of them good.

  “Does he have children?” I managed to say, the words clogging my throat on their way out.

  “Yes, he does,” Maddy said cautiously, aware that she was brushing up against a bruise.

  But she was doing more than that. In fact, what she was doing was, in my opinion, the lowest of the low, indulging her own selfish, carnal impulses in a way that guarantees to hurt, and maybe eve
n destroy, an entire family. Because that’s what infidelity does. I understand that many people adopt a very French attitude toward cheating, of compartmentalizing it away from their families, rationalizing that what the family doesn’t know can’t hurt them. It’s really a handy strategy, as it allows adulterers to do what they like without being bothered by any of that pesky guilt. Unfortunately, it isn’t so easy for the kids of cheaters to brush it aside. Once the affair comes to light—and let’s face it, maybe the cheaters think they’re as sneaky as James Bond, but they inevitably trip up on their egos—the feelings of confusion and betrayal and hurt can last far longer than the affair. Far longer than the marriage. As Maddy well knew, pretty much all of my relationship dysfunction could be traced to my parents’ own turbulent marriage.

  “Well, I can see why you didn’t tell me,” I said, my voice brittle with anger.

  “I knew how you’d react. I knew that you’d disapprove.”

  “Yup. You’re right. I think what you’re doing is awful.”

  She was silent for a minute. “I know. I keep thinking that I should end it, but then I just don’t. I mean, I know it’s wrong, but the part of me that wants it to keep going just keeps winning. I guess someone like you wouldn’t understand that,” she finally said.

  “Someone like me?” I asked, my voice rising a pitch as I tried to determine whether or not this was an insult along the lines of her telling me I’m judgmental just to try to ward off criticism.

  “Yeah, you know. What’s right is right, what’s wrong is wrong. You have a lot of moral clarity,” Maddy said.

  The irony of this statement stung. Whatever moral clarity I may have once possessed had, as of late, blurred and streaked so much it now resembled an Impressionist painting. It also reminded me of why I’d called Maddy in the first place, and now was as good a time as any to spring my news on her. Not that it was my job to punish her, but let’s just say I was less inclined to be protective of her feelings.