“Well, I have the contract and I’m on my way to Jack’s,”—Gabe’s lawyer friend—“and hopefully I’ll have it back to Billy by end-of-day.”
“Wow, it’s all happening!” I say. I’m struck with a frantic wish for Gabe to rush over to my office so I can scrutinize the contract syllable by syllable, as if acute attention to detail will give me control over any of this.
“I’m a little nervous,” Gabe says. “It’s strange to finally be on the verge of something I’ve been hoping for, for so long. There’s no way the reality can stack up to the fantasy, you know?” I feel a surge of love for Gabe. Despite my hesitations about his novel, I’m in awe of his courage—he believed in himself enough to spend years pursuing this dream, and now it’s finally paying off. I’m basking in second-hand satisfaction. “Anyway, Billy said this kind of writing has been flying off the shelves. How did he put it?” I hold my breath as Gabe searches for the right description. “A modern man’s quest for love and meaning, with a style that’s fresh and male, but sensitive, too.” A lump materializes in my throat, begging to be swallowed. I leave it be, as if in self-punishment.
Spotting my interviewee idling outside my office, I’m relieved to have an excuse to hurry Gabe off the phone. “Congrats again,” I tell him.
I escort the woman back to the elevator bank, where she shakes my hand and thanks me. “I’ve always wanted to work at a place like this. I’m so fascinated by what makes people want the things they want.”
This conjures up a memory of Gabe standing in the same spot a little more than two years ago. His words were a warped version of this woman’s: “I don’t think this is the job for me,” he told me back then. “I’m not up for the business of convincing people of what they should want.” I was disappointed; he’d been so funny and clever in his interview, not to mention attractive in a rugged and easygoing way. But he wasn’t done: “However, if you want to give me a try, as in outside of your office, here I am, brand-free.” Even at the time I saw through this little speech—claiming you’re without branding is of course its own kind of branding; no one is brand-free. Plus, it seemed imprudent to end an interview by taking a candidate’s number. Luckily, Gabe got back in touch a few weeks later—when the job had been filled—and I agreed to a date.
Back in my office, I peruse the candidate’s answers about the mannequin challenge, that video meme of groups of people staying totally still, as if someone hit a pause button on life. Why do you think it went viral? How might you use it to create a branding opportunity? I think back to Gabe’s questionnaire, its similar questions about an earlier meme, the Harlem Shake. He’d clearly already decided the job was a poor fit, and his answers were just messing around (or, I barely dared to hope, an attempt to impress me). He’d deconstructed the dance, the delight and surprise of it and its ability to bring people together, and went on to argue the cynicism inherent in trying to monetize that spirit of fellowship and conviviality. But, in parentheses at the bottom of the page, he detailed a marketing plan much savvier than the one cooked up by the guy we eventually hired. I was already smitten.
I get a text from Gabe:
If you need to reach me, kindly contact my agent!!!
Attached is an image of the signed contract.
I’m mid-response when I receive another text, this one from my mom:
Happy Labor Day to my hard-laboring daughter. Here’s a little treat for the long weekend, for spending, not saving! <3, Mom.
I see she’s Venmo-ed me $100. A knot of emotions tangles up in my gut: gratitude and anxiety and pleasure and unease. I know it gives my mom pleasure to send me cash in celebration of a random holiday. It’s like she’s making up for my lack of childhood allowance, which we could never afford. I also know how much time and effort has gone into her adopting this breezy outlook on money, which says you never know when your good fortune might end, so you may as well indulge in small pleasures while you have the chance. I, meanwhile, can’t help clinging to our family’s former ethos, which shared a similar premise but drew the opposite conclusion: Disaster is probably imminent, so you better prepare yourself by being as frugal and careful as possible.
As I refill my coffee, I overhear Melinda Lowe’s voice carrying high over the white noise. She’s sharing her Labor Day plans: “I’m so over my Hamptons share, so I said screw it and splurged on a lodge in the Catskills. The mountain vibe will be so much chiller.”
“Good for you,” her cube-mate replies. “You totally deserve that!” This is a girl who once told me with a straight face that her dream was to live in a loft in TriBeCa, but tragically, her parents would only shell out enough rent money for a studio in SoHo.
Screw it, I think. I can be indulgent, too. I text Gabe:
Let’s celebrate! A night out in honor of you!
Chapter 7
OUR JOURNEY ON the Q train may as well have transported us all the way to Russia, and a century back in time, too. Gabe has chosen Ludmilla’s for our big night out, one of those dinner-and-a-show extravaganzas in the deep Brooklyn enclave of Brighton Beach. It’s all-you-can-eat caviar and borscht, all-you-can-drink vodka, and as many hours as you can handle of full-on bombardment of the senses. Gabe doesn’t enjoy eating at most restaurants—it’s his job, he says, the equivalent of my spending my time off touring another company’s HR department—but Ludmilla’s is the polar opposite of Nonno.
I sit at our table sipping vodka and trying to embrace the overstimulation. Our fellow guests are hair-sprayed, deep-cleavaged women who look like instead of removing their makeup each day they simply add new layers on top and men in shiny shirts gaped to reveal tanned chests with tufts of dark hair. I weather crosswinds of perfume and cologne, and eavesdrop futilely on the roars and guttural thrusts of the unfamiliar Russian. It’s only when I tilt my head up to the gilded ceiling that I realize I’m a little tipsy: The chandelier is like a plaza fountain tipped upside down, spraying not water but sparkling crystal and glass. I stare and stare, thinking it’s a miracle such a structure can stay suspended. Perhaps I’m more than a little tipsy.
“Molly, look.” Gabe, equally spellbound by the scene, directs my attention to the stage, where a dozen dancers have taken formation. The music picks up, pulsing in my ears like a physical presence, and I watch, transfixed, as the costumes’ bells and tassels swing along with the dancers’ gyrations. Colors flash and blur, making me feel like I’ve been caught up in a peacock’s seduction.
As Gabe sweeps me up into the stream toward the dance floor, I’m unsteady on my feet. Spinning away from him, I feel like a breezy child; back in the cocoon of his arms, I’m a sensual woman. I lock eyes with a nearby dancer, and she winks at me, before shimmying back to her own private revelry with her partner, same as I do with Gabe. Something about this foreign, faraway place is letting me let go and drop in to what feels like a realer version of myself. Or who knows, maybe it’s just the vodka.
Back at our table, glasses topped off, I propose a toast: “To Gabe, my Scrabe!” My tongue is like rubber. “And to Bill Matherstein! To getting an agent! To having agency!” Every utterance is an exclamation.
“And to you, Molly-moo,” Gabe says.
There’s a clink of glasses, glug-glugs, then a swish of refills.
A drama is now unfolding up on stage, and I force my swimmy vision to focus. A woman in a glittery two-piece undulates around the space like a mermaid goddess, her rope of hair pendulating a beat behind. Two men circle her seriously, one stocky and fair, the other wiry and dark. Our star begins spinning from man to man, singing out in a powerful chest voice. I can’t understand her words, but in her kohl-lined eyes I read pain and confusion—she doesn’t know which suitor to pick. The men echo her song, both full of desire and anguish: Pick me, pick me. The mermaid goddess flings herself wildly from one set of arms to the other, from dark to light and back, and I hear in her song a duality of loyalties, of longings, of possible futures.
Soon the stage grows crowded with performe
rs, a grand fete of movement that folds the three lovers into its fray, overtaking their passions. But I stay with the mermaid goddess, hypnotized by her movements. Her light feet and flitting arms belie what lurks beneath, that torrent of doubt and fear and conflict. When the song ends, nearly all the dancers retire to the wings. Only our star is left on stage, and her twinned paramours crouch in shadow behind.
Her next song is like a dirge, slow and low and regretful. But something shifts in its final notes; she seems to be shoring herself up, like she’s finally come to a decision. One lover drops back and disappears, while the other comes forward to meet our star. The music turns buoyant, and the couple’s dance is a triumph of love.
I’m startled by the swell of applause, sloppy claps and cheers and clanging of glasses. There’s a flourish of bows, and then the show sweeps along to the next act. I shift my attention to Gabe, who’s pouring us fresh shots. I notice the bottle is more empty than full. “When in Odessa,” he says. “Bottoms up!”
I again don’t realize quite how drunk I am until I’m in the bathroom blinking at myself in the mirror through sludgy eyes. Women on both sides of me apply lipstick to impossibly pillowy lips. One sees me staring and holds out the tube. A few swipes and my own lips transform to a rose blooming out of my face. I twist up my pout and it looks like a bloodstain. I make a kissy face, and it’s back to the rose. All three of us are laughing. I feel like I’m made entirely of kinetic energy, or soda bubbles, or sex. Streams of Russian tumble out from between the women’s red, red lips. I sense I can almost understand them, like if I wanted to I could pluck up a fluency in the language like fishing keys from my purse. As I strut back to my table, I’m aware of the clicks of my new heeled booties against the linoleum, and of the gazes clinging to me—men’s, women’s, Gabe’s. I feel I could do anything, be anyone.
“Let’s get some air,” I say, grabbing Gabe’s hand.
It’s balmy outside, and as we stroll along the boardwalk, the sea is a black void in the distance. I tell Gabe I’d like to have a getup like the mermaid goddess’, along with a body to pull it off. “I’d pull it off for you,” Gabe says in a silly voice, one arm slung around my shoulders. “I thought the show would be pure schlock, but that dance actually moved me.”
“I know, right?” I nod like a marionette, like there’s an invisible string connecting me to Gabe.
“You could see how love overtook that lady, almost like a tide,” he says, “how she couldn’t help giving in to it and falling for that dude with the gold tassels.”
“A tide?” I thought the very opposite; I feel the string between Gabe and me snap. “No, she had to muster up all her strength and courage to choose which version of love to pursue.” A gull caws in the distance, emphasizing my point. “It’s like anything in life: You take stock of your circumstances, you weigh your options, and you pick a path. You hope for the best, but whatever the outcome, you’re responsible for what you decide to do.”
Gabe is shaking his head. “You’ve got it backwards. Love chose her, and she was powerless to resist it. Just like how it is for everyone: We listen for our calling and we do our best to heed it.” The sea is noisy against the shore. “To ride the wave of what’s meant to be.”
“Did we just watch the same show?” I ask. What I really mean is, Do we have totally different understandings of how life works? I feel the vodka pulsing through me, warping the edges of my thoughts and limbs. I can’t quite gauge how big of a deal this is—Gabe believes in something that sounds a lot like fate. Here I’ve been thinking we’ve been building a life together, whereas all along Gabe has just been riding a wave, believing he’s following someone else’s plan. No wonder he hasn’t proposed—if he’s waiting for some mysterious sign from the universe, who knows when it’ll happen? I narrow my eyes at Gabe, trying to decide to whether this new information qualifies as merely curious or cause for despair. I wonder what other bizarre discoveries about him are in store for me. “I think maybe you left Russia and crossed over the border to the Ukraine.”
“Or Mongolia,” Gabe says.
“Maybe Poland,” I respond.
“Kazakhstan?”
I giggle and repeat the word under my breath, unsure whether it’s a real country or just a made-up territory from a board game. That’s the extent of my knowledge of Russia’s bordering nations, so I pull Gabe down to a bench. “How about right here in the U. S. of A.?” I press my lips to his.
“I love you, Molly-moo,” Gabe says, just as a giant wave crashes thunderously to shore. “And I have an idea.”
I’m expecting a hand up my skirt, or a suggestion that we strip and run buck-naked into the sea. But instead there’s a whisper in my ear, ticklish like static: “Let’s get married. What do you say, wanna be my wife?”
I look at Gabe: his mouth now stained the same red as mine, his eyelids at half-mast, his cheeks dabbed with dimple. I try to capture a clear snapshot, a solid souvenir to take away from this moment. But I can only see Gabe through the hazy lens of love. I couldn’t even describe what he looks like, beyond sweet and beautiful and mine. Lingering in the air is the question I’ve spent hours upon hours turning over in my head, hoping to hear, even as I simultaneously tried not to hope too hard. Finally, what I’ve wished for is happening, as natural as the tides, the words dashed off so easily—vibrations carried up through Gabe’s throat, forming sound, becoming voice. The world around me wavers between real and surreal.
“Molly?” Gabe says.
“Yes?” His smile is contagious, then I remember that a question requires an answer: “Yes!”
Gabe lifts me in the air, his hands steady around my waist, and he whoops and hollers. The ocean whooshes and froths. Two women stumble by, laughing, enhancing our cheer.
Through some series of steps, we end up back on the Q, the two of us alone on what feels like the last train out of Brighton Beach. Gabe pinches my thigh and drops his head onto my shoulder. “Hey, fiancée.”
I’ve sobered up slightly, and it occurs to me that in all my imagining of a proposal, I didn’t let myself wish for more than the question. Now an image forms in my mind: Gabe on bended knee, a ring, a little speech. I’m embarrassed by how traditional it all is.
“What’s on your mind?” Gabe asks.
“Oh.” I inhale deeply, shoring up my courage, and then I confess my hopes for all the rituals of engagement. “I know it sounds silly and old-fashioned.”
“Hey,” says Gabe. “Never apologize for what you want.”
I consider this as we ride several stops in silence, moving up the alphabet of avenues, from U to M to J to H. Suddenly Gabe is crouching down, kneeling before me on the grimy subway floor. He’s holding a circle of twisty-ties between two fingers, wrangled from who knows where. I fixate on it like it might disappear. “Just a stand-in, of course,” he says.
“You don’t really have to do this—”
But Gabe cuts me off: “Molly, I really do believe love chooses us. Falling in love with you felt inevitable. Every day I’ve asked myself how I got so lucky.” A jerk of the train totters Gabe’s balance and I reach out to steady him. “So, will you, Molly Stone, do me the honor of joining me not just for the rest of this subway ride”—he can’t help a smirk—“but for the rest of my life?”
“Yes, I will,” I say, just as the overhead speaker blares, “Next stop, Beverley Road.”
“How’s that for romance?” Gabe says, joining me back on the seat, both of us laughing. I rest my head on his shoulder and nod off for the remainder of the ride, content.
Not until we’re home in bed, long after we’ve undressed and “engaged” with each other (Gabe’s dumb joke), does a crack of curiosity pierce my joy. It’s about Gabe’s take on the mermaid goddess, and fate. “Psst,” I say, poking through the thin skin of his sleep. “Is that what you think about your writing, too—that it chose you? Like it was destined?”
Gabe’s eyes are still shut. “Uh-huh,” he murmurs.
�
�The topic, too?”
“Mm,” he says, rolling over directly into snore.
I sit up. I picture the character of Dahlia floating around in the ether and then finding her way into Gabe’s brain, Gabe apparently just a vessel. I’m wary of this belief in a bigger system of forces at work. It seems like an awfully convenient way to shirk responsibility for your own choices.
To my mind, everyone’s situations are a nexus of happenstance and a million deliberate decisions. So much is chance (I feel a pang, thinking of my father, a shadow figure I know mainly from my mother and brother’s stories). But the rest is how we choose to act in the face of all that randomness. We have agency.
Although, of course, Gabe now has a different kind of agency: He has an actual agent, one Bill Matherstein, a.k.a. Billy Boy. Is that what getting an agent means—outsourcing your own agency to someone else? In other words, is the future of Gabe’s novel now out of Gabe’s control? It’s an unnerving thought. But then I consider my own agency, and I remember Gabe’s words on the train: “Never apologize for what you want.” Apologizing for what I want is what comes most naturally to me. And if I can’t even admit what I want, can I truly have agency either? Gabe turns over, his snores fizzling out, and I’m happy to realize I admitted to wanting at least this one thing: Gabe and me. I kiss my fiancé and whisper to his sleeping form, “I choose you.”
Chapter 8
GABE AND I attempt to blunt the blades of our hangovers with runny eggs and buttery toast. It doesn’t work, but we’re in good spirits anyway. We lay sprawled across the living room rug like seals at low tide, and I’m content simply to be still beside the person I’ve decided to tether myself to for good. I rub my cheek against the rug’s soft fibers and my hand against Gabe’s muscled calf.
“So,” says Gabe, “ready to share our news? Whose family first?”
The thought of talking to my mom at the moment adds aches to my chills. “Yours.”
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