Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows)

by Judith Arnold

  But nice? She and Ted weren't engaging in small talk. They were engaging in microscopic talk.

  Her friends must have sensed how uncomfortable she was. "We really should go, Erika," Becky said. "I'm parked in the short-term lot. I don't want to get a ticket."

  Erika knew Becky wouldn't get a ticket as long as she handed over whatever amount of money the parking lot attendant charged. But Becky was giving her an excuse to leave, and she gratefully grabbed it. "You've got to catch your next flight, too," she said to Ted.

  "Yeah." He still hadn't smiled. Not once. "Okay. You'd better go." Belatedly, he seemed to remember the teddy bear in his hand. "This is for you," he said, passing it to her as if it were a hot potato he didn't want to get caught holding.

  The bear's surface was soft plush. She suppressed the urge to give it a hug. "Thank you."

  "Yeah. Well."

  "Good-bye, Ted."

  "Good-bye, Erika."

  She peered into his face, searching for something. Not a smile-she'd relinquished that hope. But maybe a softening. A hint of forgiveness. An acknowledgment that things really were finished between them.

  Nothing. Just the steely coldness of his eyes, the grim set of his mouth, the sharp angles of his nose and jaw. As cute as he'd been in high school, he was cuter now. Hell, he was gorgeous.

  But she didn't feel that warm tingle he used to stir inside her. She felt only cold. Colder than the snow that blanketed so much of Colorado. The cold of grief and loss and death.

  "Erika?" Anna called to her.

  She spun from Ted and walked resolutely away, her friends flanking her. Anna bowed toward her and murmured, "Wow, that was weird."

  "Really awkward," Becky added.

  "You okay?"

  "Sure," Erika lied.

  "What are you going to do with the teddy bear?" Adrienne asked, and Anna and Becky started to laugh again.

  "You could name him Lost Cause."

  "Give Up," Anna suggested.

  "Take a Hint," Becky chimed in.

  "Take a Hike."

  Erika joined their laughter. But none of it seemed funny.

  Shit.

  You watch her walk away with her friends, whispering and giggling. She doesn't even look like Erika anymore, with that short hairstyle and the snug jeans and sweater and the stylish parka with fur trimming the hood, and the fancy boots. Not her riding boots but shin-high and constructed of some sort of rugged animal hide, like what you'd expect to see on Eskimos. Who was she? Who had she turned into?

  And come on, what did you expect? That she'd see you in the airport and suddenly remember everything you'd been to each other, every magical moment of your romance? That she'd race into your arms and say, "Oh, Ted, I've missed you so much! I broke up with you because I thought I'd never see you again-but now I've seen you and I realize what a fool I've been. Take me back!"

  Yes. That was exactly what you expected.

  You are the biggest moron who ever walked the planet.

  It's over, you tell yourself It's over, over, over. Get it through your skull, man. It's over.

  Tempe was not New Jersey. It was warm and arid and brown. From the moment he landed in Phoenix, he knew he'd traveled more than a bunch of miles. He'd entered another world, just like Erika had when she'd left for college.

  The apartment Dave found for them was cheap but clean, no little six-legged critters scampering across the kitchen floor or hiding in the bathroom. The furniture that came with the place had clearly started its life elsewhere. Nothing matched. But there were two beds in the bedroom, a sofa and a couple of tables in the living room, a Formica-topped table and chairs in the kitchen. And a phone. Just in case Erika decided to call him.

  It's over, he told himself. He'd seen her and realized she was not his Erika anymore. She was someone else, and it was over ... and still, he looked at the phone and wondered if she would ever make use of the number he'd given her.

  Within a week of arriving in Tempe, he had landed a job as a telemarketer. He sat in a tiny cubicle in a vast call center, wearing a headset, making calls, taking calls. Not the most stimulating job in the world, but it provided him with an income. He was getting a regular wage and paying rent and utilities. Nineteen years old, and he was a grown-up.

  She's just a college kid living off the largesse of her parents, he thought disdainfully. I'm a man, making my own way. Check this out, Fred. I'm a man.

  His days developed a routine, more of a schedule than he'd had since graduating from high school. He woke early, showered, shaved, slugged down some coffee, and went to the call center. He put in his hours. He came home, sometimes stopping on his way to grab some take-out fast food but more often preparing his own dinners to save money. He wasn't eating the way he ate when his mother did the cooking, but he got pretty good at grilling burgers and hotdogs, and peanut-butter sandwiches and salads fell within his competency range.

  Dave didn't adapt to Tempe as well as Ted did. Not long after Ted started his job at the call center, Dave decided the desert wasn't for him and took off, leaving Ted on his own. Day by day, he went to work, he came home, he budgeted his money, he made ends meet. Barely, but he did it. Yeah, he was a man. Putting in the time and earning a living.

  As soon as he entered the apartment each evening-before he opened his mail, before he hit the bathroom, before he ate-he checked the answering machine attached to his phone. Call me, Erika. Call and let me tell you how much of a man I am. I'm putting it all together. I'm an adult. You would be so impressed. You would see that I've gotten my act together. I'm not a loser pumping gas. Call me.

  She never did. The rare times the light on the answering machine flashed, he'd dive across the kitchen, punch the button, and listen breathlessly to some stupid message from the landlord about how garbage not tied in thick plastic bags might attract vermin to the Dumpster, so please make sure you tie your garbage bag before you toss it into the bin.

  No calls from Erika. None.

  Asshole, she's not going to call you.

  Some nights he crawled into bed and lay awake for hours, imagining the stars scattered across the broad desert sky. As a child, he used to recite the poem, "Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight," and send his wishes into the heavens. Now he imagined the stars as surfaces he could bounce messages off. If he sent a message to a star, would it bounce at the correct angle and somehow reach Erika in Colorado? He lay alone, listening to the silence and sending his wishes skyward: Call me, Erika. Love me as much as I love you.

  The stars failed him. Or else they passed his messages to her and she failed him.

  On nights that he was too restless and lonely to lie in bed beaming messages to the stars, he would wander over to Arizona State University. The campus soon became his destination of choice. It took him little time to obtain a fake ID; when necessary, he became Matt Hackett, born three years before Ted Skala. He could buy liquor. He could hang out at frat houses, smoke weed, listen to music, pick up girls.

  None of them was Erika.

  He tried to convince himself that was a good thing. If they weren't like Erika, they wouldn't be able to touch him the way she had. They wouldn't be able to reach inside him and claim his heart. They wouldn't be able to hurt him.

  He would never let anyone hurt him again. He would never let anyone get that close to him, under his skin, into his soul.

  Still, he wanted Erika to know how cool he was, how selfsufficient, how mature. She wasn't the only one going to frat parties. Not only was he going to frat parties, too, but he was also working. Earning money. Paying freaking taxes. Contributing to Social Security. He wanted her to know he was making something of himself.

  But he wouldn't call her. Somewhere inside him, he had a teardrop's worth of pride, and that pride kept him from calling.

  Instead, he waited for her to call him.

  No calls. No messages. No contact.

  It's over, Skala. She's gone. It's over.

  The teddy bear was ado
rable. But Erika's friends had made fun of it, and she suspected they were also making sense. A teddy bear couldn't bring her and Ted back together. She didn't want them back together.

  And he didn't want them back together, either. He'd told her he would never be with her again. She had to take him at his word.

  She tossed the teddy bear onto the shelf in her closet and tried to forget it was there. She tried to forget Ted, too. Tried to forget how wistful he'd looked in the airport. He'd exuded a potent mixture of emotions as he'd stood with her at the gate. Hope. Fear. Bravado. Sentimentality. Condemnation.

  He'd hated her hair. He hadn't had to say it; she'd sensed it.

  She told herself that what Ted Skala thought of her hair, or anything else, didn't matter. He was now living in Tempe, Arizona, of all places-she had no idea why, and she told herself that didn't matter, either. What mattered was that he was moving on with his life. Like her, he was breaking away from home and the past and their adolescent love. He was embracing new adventures.

  Teddy bear or no teddy bear, he was kissing the past goodbye, turning his back on what had once been and opening himself to the world that awaited him beyond the safe, cozy confines of Mendham. This was a good thing. She should be happy for him.

  Every now and then, she glimpsed the bear as she rummaged through the clutter on her closet shelf for a scarf or a pair of gloves. She saw the plush brown doll sitting in the corner, staring at her with an accusatory expression that reminded her too much of the way Ted had stared at her in the airport. "I should throw you out," she muttered, shoving the bear deeper in to the closet. "I should donate you to a children's hospital or a shelter or something."

  But she didn't. She couldn't get rid of the bear any more than she could get rid of the letters and drawings Ted had sent her. They all remained safely in a folder inside her desk, except for the first one. She'd framed that one.

  Because it was a beautiful piece of artwork, she told herself. Because it was worthy of display. Not because Ted had drawn it for her.

  Moving on with your life didn't mean you had to forget about what you'd lived so far. She could remember Ted, remember how precious their love had been. Remember the nights in the backseat of the Wagoneer, when he'd been so gentle and careful with her, when he'd accepted her gift of herself and treated it as a priceless treasure. Remember their long walks and their long talks and even their long, companionable silences, when the only sound was the music spilling from the Wagoneer's radio. Phish. Spin Doctors. Fleetwood Mac, that gorgeous, tender ballad: I love you, I love you, like never before ...

  Oh, hell. She wanted to forget. She just couldn't.

  YOUR FATHER WAS RIGHT. The world is full of girls.

  Girls at Arizona State. Girls with sun-streaked hair and sunbaked skin who study all day and party all night. Girls whose names and faces melt into a sweet blur, thanks to the recreational ingestion of booze and grass. They're just as hammered as you are, so it all works out somehow.

  You party with them during the night, and during the day you learn how to balance a checkbook and how to deliver what your boss is asking of you. When work at the call center begins to pall, you land another job, this time as a salesman at a Dodge dealership. Not such a huge leap from pumping gas, when you think about it. Cars are cars.

  You've never done sales before, but you're friendly and helpful and clearheaded on the job. Dealing with all those numbers-negotiating the prices for accessory packages, calculating sales taxdoesn't come easily to you, but if you can balance your checkbook, you can figure out how much to charge for floor mats without losing the dealership its profit. You're the youngest salesman, and your colleagues all remind you of your friends' fathers-beefy, responsible heads-of-household, guys who've gained enough weight since their high school days that their hands have become plump and they have to wear their school rings on their cocktail-hotdog pinkies.

  These are not guys you'd do a number with after work. They aren't guys you could sit down and discuss Soundgarden and Alice in Chains with. They probably wouldn't know what to make of the drawings you did late at night when you weren't lost in a happy haze at some campus party, drawings of laughing donkeys and desert flowers, flowing lines and vibrant colors.

  But the guys at the Dodge dealership accept you as a fellow sales associate. An adult. A man.

  And you get a business card. A business card! With your name printed on it, along with the Dodge logo and the dealer's address and phone number.

  Your own freaking business card!

  If that's not a sign of success, you don't know what is.

  As weeks passed without a phone message from Erika, Ted stopped racing to the answering machine the minute he entered his apartment. She wasn't going to call. He got that. It was over. Done. Stick a fork in it, Skala-it's cooked.

  But then she surprised him by sending him a postcard. He didn't always remember to check his mailbox, a narrow rectangular receptacle with a locked door, one of many in a panel attached to the apartment building's wall near the front entry. Sometimes he'd unlock the mailbox door and swing it open, and dozens of commercial mailings would spill out. He'd realize that days had passed since he'd last looked inside the box.

  This was one of those days. When he turned the lock, the mailbox's skinny silver door practically burst open, releasing a blizzard of fliers, glossy catalogues, and take-out restaurant menus. He gathered the scattered mailings from the floor in front of the mailboxes, carried them to the trash can, and, one by one, tossed them.

  If he'd discarded them all together, he might have missed Erika's postcard mixed in with the junk mail.

  He read it. Read it again. Shit. It didn't say anything.

  Sure, it said something. She was busy, hoped he was enjoying Tempe, blah-blah-blah. Like he cared. Like this mattered.

  He tossed the postcard on the kitchen counter once he'd entered his apartment. En route to the bedroom, he emptied the pockets of the neat khakis he had to wear for work and tossed his keys, change, and wallet onto the dresser. As he reached for a pair of shorts, his gaze snagged on his wallet.

  He had a business card. She wanted to know how he was doing? Hell, he'd show her how he was doing. Nineteen years old, and he had his own business card. If that didn't impress her ...

  He didn't question why he wanted to impress her. Instead, he slid the card into an envelope along with a note telling her he was now working as an auto salesman and doing well. He didn't even mention the business card. Let her open the envelope and find it in there, and think, Wow! Ted has a business card! He's a man and he's going places!

  Eventually, the place he went was Seattle. Selling cars wasn't for him. He was into art, not commerce. He heard the pot was as good in Seattle as it was in Tempe, and the air wasn't as dry. And the music scene up there was supposedly phenomenal. He'd listened to the mix tape Erika had made for him so many times he could sing all the songs, in order, from memory.

  Enough. Time to move on. Time to stop listening to her music and start listening to his own.

  So he bought a one-way ticket from Greyhound, packed up the few possessions he'd accrued since arriving in Tempe, and headed north. Seattle was as cold and damp as Tempe was hot and dry, and after a while in the great Northwest, he headed back south, over the border, down to Costa Rica.

  He was young and the world was full of girls.

  He fell in with a shaggy expat named Bob who hadn't quite lost the West Virginia twang in his voice and who scrapped and scrounged for food. "You wanna learn how to surf?" he offered Ted. "I can teach you that. You wanna learn how to catch a turtle and turn it into soup? I can teach you that, too."

  "I'd rather learn how to surf," Ted said.

  So Bob taught him how to surf.

  Conquering the waves convinced Ted he could conquer anything. He could stand on a narrow board and not lose his balance, even if a ten-foot roller tried to crush him. He wasn't quite as daring as Bob, or as crazy, but he figured if the waves couldn't destroy
him, nothing could.

  Not even a broken heart. Especially not a broken heart. You just had to learn to protect yourself, keep your wits about you, maintain your footing when the board was slick with seawater and the ocean was foaming all around you.

  At one time, he hadn't been able to do that. Now, he could.

  Costa Rica was full of girls, but he avoided a lot of them for the simple reason that they were Latina. He'd once loved a girl who was half Latina, whose skin turned bronze at the first hint of sunshine, who had dozens of cousins living in Colombia, who could speak Spanish like a native when the atmosphere was right. He'd once loved a girl whose name began with a vowel, so he avoided girls whose names began with vowels. Eva, Irina, Olivia, Ursulano, thanks. He learned to read the potential danger in certain ocean conditions and stay on dry land, and he knew to avoid potential danger in relationships.

  "Life is about two things," Bob once told him, pushing the long wet snarls of his hair back from his face as he and Ted lugged their boards across the sand after a day of surfing. "Survival, and getting wrecked. Sometimes you need to get wrecked if you want to survive. Sometimes, seems like the whole point of survival is to get your hands on some booze or weed and get yourself wrecked. They go hand in hand."

  Not exactly Ted's philosophy, although he respected Bob's hard-won take on the world. Ted's philosophy was that the best way to survive was to protect yourself. Take chances with your body if you want, but protect your heart. Vulnerability equaled death, so don't ever let yourself be vulnerable.

  He'd had his heart broken once. He was never going to let that happen again.

  THIS IS WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT, Erika thought, stretching languidly beneath the Caribbean sun. The heat baked her, the sand beneath her towel cradled her, and the salt-laden breezes blowing in off the water reminded her, with each gust, of how much she loved the ocean.