Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “Elsie, listen. We get it. You take as much time as you need. You have plenty of vacation days, sick days, personal time saved up,” he says, trying to be helpful.

  “How much my-husband-died time do I have?” I ask, trying to lighten the mood, trying to make this okay for everyone. But it’s not okay for everyone, and the joke lands like a belly flop. You could fit a city bus in the length of the awkward pause between us. “Anyway, thank you, Lyle. I think it’s best that I get back into my routine. Life has to go on, right?” I am all talk right now. Life can’t go on. That’s just a thing people say to other people because they heard it on daytime TV. It doesn’t exist for me. It never will. There will be no moving on. But people not living in the valley of a tragedy don’t like to hear this. They like to hear you “buck up.” They want to say to your friends, to your co-workers, to the people you used to ride elevators with, that you’re “handling it well.” That you’re a “trooper.” The more crass of them want to say you’re a “tough bitch” or a “hard as nails motherfucker.” I’m not, but let them think it. It’s easier on all of us.

  “Well, great. You just let me know the day.”

  “The funeral is tomorrow morning and I’ll take the rest of the weekend to rest. How about Tuesday?” I say.

  “Tuesday sounds fine,” he says. “And Elsie?”

  “Yeah?” I say, wanting to get off the phone.

  “May he rest in peace. We can never know God’s plan for us.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say and hang up the phone. This is the first time someone has mentioned God to me, and I want to wring Lyle’s fat neck. To be honest, it seems rude to even mention it to me. It’s like your friend talking about how much fun she had at the party you weren’t invited to. God has forsaken me. Stop rubbing it in how great God’s been to you.

  I put the phone down on the kitchen table. “One down,” I say. “Can I take a shower before the next one?” Ana nods.

  I head into the shower and turn on the faucet, wondering how I’m going to start this conversation, wondering how it can possibly go. Are my parents going to offer to fly out here? That would be terrible. Are they not going to offer to come out here at all? That would be even worse. Ana knocks on the door, and I turn off the water. I’m sure she thinks that I’ll never get out of here on my own, and I don’t want to give her any more to worry about than I already have. I can get myself out of the damn shower. For now.

  I put on a robe and grab the phone. If I don’t do it this second, I won’t do it, so let’s do it.

  I dial their home phone. My father answers.

  “It’s Elsie,” I say.

  “Oh, hi, Eleanor,” my father replies. I feel like he’s spitting in my face by saying my full name, reminding me that I am not who they intended. On my first day of school in kindergarten, I told everyone to call me Elsie. I told my teacher it was short for Eleanor, but in reality, I had liked the name ever since I saw Elsie the Cow on ice cream cartons. It was a couple of months before my mother figured out what exactly was going on, but by that time, try as she might, she could not get my friends to call me Eleanor. It was my first true rebellion.

  “Do you and Mom have a minute to talk?” I ask.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. We’re on our way out. I’ll call you some other time. Is that okay?” he says.

  “No, actually, I’m sorry. I need to speak with you now. It’s rather important.”

  My father tells me to hold on.

  “What is it, Eleanor?” My mother is now on the phone.

  “Is Dad on the line too?”

  “I’m here. What did you want to say?”

  “Well, I believe I told you about a man I was seeing. Ben.”

  “Uh-huh,” my mother says. She sounds like she’s distracted. Like she’s putting on lipstick or watching the maid fold the laundry.

  “Well,” I start. I don’t want to do this. What good comes of this? What good comes of me saying it out loud? Of hearing it through their ears? “Ben was hit by a car and passed away.”

  My mother gasps. “Oh my God, Eleanor. I’m sorry to hear that,” she says.

  “Jesus,” my dad says.

  “I don’t know what to say,” my mother adds. But she can’t stand not saying something so she pulls something out of her ass. “I trust you’ve informed his family.” My parents see death every day, and I think it has made them numb to it in a lot of ways. I think it’s made them numb to life too, but I’m sure they’d just say I’m too sensitive.

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s all taken care of. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Well,” my mother says, still pulling words out of thin air. “I imagine this is a hard time for you, but I hope you know that we feel for you. I just . . . My word. Have you had time to process? Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m not okay, exactly. The other thing I wanted to tell you is that Ben and I were married in a private ceremony two weeks ago. He died as my husband.”

  It’s out of my mouth. I have done my job. Now all I have to do is get off the phone.

  “Why did you marry someone you barely knew?” my father asks, and there it is, off and running.

  “Your father’s right, Eleanor. I don’t even know . . . ” My mother is livid. I can hear it in her voice.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I say.

  “Forget telling us!” she says. “What were you thinking? How long had you known this man?”

  “Long enough to know that he was the love of my life,” I say, defensively.

  They are silent. I can tell my mom wants to say something.

  “Just go ahead,” I say.

  “I knew your father for four years before I agreed to even go on a date with him, Eleanor. We dated for another five before we got married. You can’t possibly know enough about a person after a few months.”

  “It was six months. I met him six months ago,” I say. God, even I know this sounds paltry and embarrassing. It makes me feel so stupid.

  “Precisely!” my dad pipes in. “Eleanor, this is terrible. Just terrible. We are so sorry you have been hurt like this, but you will move on. I promise.”

  “No, but, Charles,” my mom interjects. “It’s also important that she understands that she needs to take more time with her decisions. This is exactly—”

  “Guys, I don’t want to talk about this right now. I just thought you should know I’m a widow.”

  “A widow?” my mother says. “No, I don’t think you should consider yourself a widow. Don’t label yourself like that. That’s only going to make it more difficult to rebound from this. How long were you two married?” I can hear the judgment in her voice.

  “A week and a half,” I say. I’m rounding up. How sad is that? I’m fucking rounding up.

  “Eleanor, you are going to be okay,” my father tells me.

  “Yes,” my mother says. “You will be fine. You will get back up on your feet. I hope you haven’t taken too much time off work at the library. You know with state budget cuts, it really isn’t the time to be compromising your job. Although, I was talking to one of my friends on the board of the hospital, and she mentioned that her daughter is a law librarian. She works directly with some very high-powered attorneys on some really impressive cases. I could call her, or give you her number if you’d like. They are a bicoastal firm.”

  I’ve always known that my mother will take any opportunity to remind me that I can be better than I am now. I can be more impressive than I am now. I have the potential to do more with my life than I am doing now. And I didn’t necessarily think she’d waste this opportunity out of fear of being insensitive and gauche, but I don’t think I realized how seamlessly she’d be able to do it. I can hear, as she speaks, how far I have strayed from their plan for me. This is what happens when you are your parents’ only child, when they wanted more but couldn’t have any, when they procreated for the purpose of building mini-versions of themselves. This is what happens when they realize you aren’t going to be like them and
they aren’t sure what to do about it.

  It always bothered me until I moved out here, away from them, out of sight of their disapproving stares, their condescending voices. It didn’t bother me again until right now. I have to assume it’s because I didn’t need them again until right now. And as much as I may say that nothing will make this better, I’m inclined to think that feeling supported by my parents would have made this just a little bit easier to bear.

  “No, thanks, Mom,” I say and hope that the conversation will end there. That she will give up and just resolve to sell harder next time.

  “Well,” my dad says. “Is there anything you need from us?”

  “Nothing, Dad. I just wanted you guys to know. I hope you have a good rest of your night,” I say.

  “Okay, I’m sorry for your loss, Eleanor.” My mother hangs up her end of the line.

  “We really wish you the best, Elsie,” my dad says. It catches me off guard, hearing the name out of his mouth. He is trying. It means that he is trying. “We just . . . we don’t know how to . . . ” He breathes audibly and restarts. “You know how your mother is,” he says, and he leaves it at that.

  “I know.”

  “We love you,” he says, and I say, “I love you too,” out of social convention rather than feeling.

  I hang up the phone.

  “It’s done now,” Ana says to me. She grabs my hand. She holds it to her heart. “I’m so proud of you for that one. You handled yourself really, really well.” She hugs me, and I throw my face into her body. Ana’s shoulder is a soft place to cry, but I’ve heard urban legends about the safety of a mother’s arms and that sounds pretty good right now.

  “Okay,” I say. “I think I’m going to go lie down.”

  “Okay,” she says. She cleans the plates from the table. Hers is an empty plate covered in maple syrup. Mine is clean but full of pancake. “If you’re hungry, let me know.”

  “Okay,” I say, but I am already in my room, already lying down, and I already know I won’t be hungry. I look up at the ceiling and I don’t know how much time passes. I remember that his cell phone still exists somewhere. That the number didn’t die when he did. And I call it. I listen to him over and over, hanging up and dialing again.

  JANUARY

  It was a rainy and cold Saturday night. Well, cold for Los Angeles. It was fifty degrees and windy. The wind had started to sway the trees and make the rain fall sideways. It was only five o’clock but the sun had already set. Ben and I decided to go to a wine bar not too far from my house. Neither one of us cared that much about wine, but it had covered valet parking, so it seemed the most dry of the nearby options.

  We made our way to the table, taking off our wet coats and mussing with our hair. It had been so cold outside that the inside felt warm and cozy, as if we were sitting at a campfire.

  I ordered a caprese salad and a Diet Coke. When Ben ordered a pasta dish and a glass of Pinot Noir, I remembered that the whole point of this place was the wine bar.

  “Oh,” I said. “Cancel the Diet Coke. I’ll have the same.” The waiter grabbed our menus and walked away.

  “You don’t have to order wine if you don’t want wine,” Ben said.

  “Well,” I said to him. “When in Rome!”

  Our glasses came shortly after, filled halfway with dark red. We swirled the glasses under our noses, smiling at each other, neither of us having any idea what we were doing.

  “Ah,” Ben said. “A faint smell of blackberry and . . . ” He sipped his drink in a reserved, taste-tester sort of way. “It has a woodsy quality to it, don’t you think?”

  “Mmmm,” I said, sipping mine and pretending to contemplate. “Very woodsy. Very full-bodied.”

  We both laughed. “Yes!” Ben said. “I forgot full-bodied. Wine people love saying things are full-bodied.”

  He started to chug his down. “Honestly,” he said, “it all tastes the same to me.”

  “Me too,” I said, as I sipped mine again. Although, I had to admit that while I couldn’t speak to the tannins or the base notes or whatever else people that know wine know, it tasted wonderful. After a few more sips, it started to feel wonderful.

  Our food had just been served when Ben’s phone rang. He put it through to voice mail as I took a bite of my salad. He started to eat his pasta and his phone rang again. Again, he ignored the call. I finally caved and asked.

  “Who is that?” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, clearly wishing I hadn’t asked. “It’s just a girl that I dated a while ago. She drunk-dials sometimes.”

  “It’s not even seven thirty.”

  “She’s a bit . . . What is the correct way to say this? She is . . . a party girl? Is that the polite way to say that?”

  “I guess it depends on what you’re trying to say.”

  “She’s an alcoholic,” he said. “That’s why I stopped dating her.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly that it caught me off guard. It almost seemed silly because it was so serious.

  “She calls from time to time. I think she’s trying to booty-call me.”

  I wanted to laugh again at him using the expression booty-call, but deep down, I was starting to get jealous and I could feel the jealousy moving its way closer and closer to the surface.

  “Ah” was all I said.

  “I’ve told her I’m with someone. Trust me. It’s annoying more than anything else.”

  The jealousy was now hot on my skin. “Okay.”

  “Are you upset?”

  “No,” I said, breezily, as if I truly wasn’t upset. Why did I do this? Why not just say “Yes”?

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No.”

  “You’re doing that thing.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yep, your chest is getting red and you’re speaking in clipped tones. That means you’re mad.”

  “How would you even know that?”

  “Because I pay attention.”

  “Okay,” I said finally. “I just . . . I don’t like it. This woman you used to date—which by the way, let’s just acknowledge means you used to sleep with—I don’t know if I like that she’s calling you to do it again.”

  “I know. I agree with you. I told her to stop,” he said to me. He didn’t seem angry but he did seem defensive.

  “I know. I know. I believe you, I just . . . Look, we said we would be exclusive for these five weeks, but if you don’t want to . . . ”

  “What?” Ben had long ago stopped eating his pasta.

  “Never mind.”

  “Never mind?”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Why I asked this question, what I thought it proved, I do not know. You don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to. I never learned this.

  “What does that matter?”

  “I’m just asking,” I said.

  “It was a bit before I met you,” he said, looking down into his wineglass, sipping it to hide from me.

  “How much of a ‘bit’ are we talking about?”

  Ben smiled, embarrassed. “I saw her the night before I met you,” he said.

  I wanted to reach across the table and wring his neck. My face flushed with jealousy. My chest felt like my lungs were a bonfire. I didn’t have a good reason. I couldn’t rationalize it. I wanted to yell at him and tell him what he had done wrong, but he hadn’t done anything wrong. Nothing at all. It didn’t even make sense for me to be this jealous. I just . . . I wanted to believe that Ben was mine. I wanted to believe that no one had made him smile until I did, no woman had made him yearn to touch her until I had. Suddenly, the woman calling took on a personality of her own in my head. I saw her in a red dress with long black hair. She probably wore black lace bra and panty sets. They probably always matched. In my head, her stomach was flat. In my head, she liked to be on top. Instead of admitting my jealousy, instead of telling the truth, I scoured the facts and tried to find a way to blame him.

  “I just don’t k
now how much I believe you’re really pushing her away. I mean, a woman doesn’t call over and over if she knows she’s going to be rejected.”

  “It’s my fault she’s a drunk?”

  “No—”

  “You’re telling me you don’t know any women that are so confident in their attractiveness that they don’t ever hear no?”

  “So now you’re saying this woman is hot?” I challenged.

  “What does that have to do with this?”

  “So she is,” I said.

  “Why are you being so insecure right now?”

  What. The. Fuck.

  It wasn’t necessary. I could have stayed at the table. I could have finished my meal and told him to take me home and stay at his place. I could have done lots of things. I had plenty of options. But at the time it felt like I had one option and that option was to take my coat, put it on, call him an asshole under my breath, and walk out.

  It wasn’t until I was standing in the rain without the valet ticket that I started to realize all of the other options I had. I saw him through the restaurant’s front window. I saw him look around for a waiter. I saw him flag one down and hand over a wad of cash. I saw him grab his jacket. I just stood outside in the cold rain, hugging my jacket tighter around myself, shivering a bit and wondering what I was going to say to him when he came out. I was starting to feel pretty stupid for walking out. I was starting to feel like the stupidity of my walking out had eclipsed his insensitivity.

  As he headed out to the front door, I saw through the window that he checked his phone and it was lit up again. I saw him put the call through to voice mail for the third time in ten minutes, and I grew angry again. Jealousy was so ugly. It made me feel so ugly.

  I felt the gust of warm air as he opened the door and came out. When it shut, I went back to being freezing cold again.

  “Elsie—” he started to say. I couldn’t read this tone. I didn’t know if he was going to be contrite, defensive, or irritated, so I interrupted him.