by Megan Mulry
Of course she was moving to Chicago. There was a man there who loved her. A man she loved. From the very beginning, she thought she was getting something that everyone else was too shallow to perceive. Beneath his bawdy jokes and big vodkas, she thought, he was really sincere. They shared a deep, quiet connection. The killjoy part of her brain sassed that the connection might be quiet because it was unspoken lust… or unspoken because it didn’t exist… but she shoved that aside. It was her turn to have the great love chapter of her life. She had always dated artsy, intellectual types. As her college roommate used to jest, Bronte liked readers. And here, instead, was a broad-shouldered, high school football captain, card-carrying male. He read Tom Clancy, not Tom Wolfe.
So what?
He had always dated pert blonds; for the long haul, Bronte argued with herself, he wanted the artsy intellectual. It was a twisted sort of justice for them to end up together.
She tried to be rational, weighing the pros and cons of uprooting herself and moving to Chicago to be with him. Mr. Texas looked great on paper. He had his own successful investment business, came from a great family (parents who loved each other!), and had lots of funny, engaging friends.
They had not been dating long enough to warrant a marriage proposal, but she thought they might have a real chance. She didn’t care if she ever got married, technically. If she was with the right person, she would know, and it would be right. Right?
If she moved to Chicago, she would finally be able to see how they would be together in real life, on a daily basis. If not, she was sure she would spend the rest of her life feeling like she hadn’t tried hard enough to secure her own happiness.
She wanted to go for it.
By mid-September, certain that seeing each other every day would alleviate some of that crazy urgency and let them settle into a more normal relationship, she applied for a job at a fantastic boutique advertising agency in Chicago and got it. She wanted to surprise him.
He was surprised all right.
He was psyched she was moving to Chicago. He told her he was psyched.
“Yeah, I’m psyched.”
But Bronte was never able to shake the feeling that he couldn’t quite get himself fully behind anything that wasn’t entirely his idea.
“Sure, that’ll be great, darlin’.” He sounded like he was watching television and having a beer while he talked to her. Half-listening.
There was no way any relationship could or should sustain the level of full-throttle intensity that they had shared those first few months, she assured herself. It was perfectly fine that he wasn’t, you know, ecstatic. They were mellowing. They were both exhausted, she told herself when, occasionally, he was unable to talk as long.
She still slept like a baby, but a teething one. With the croup. And diaper rash. And colic. Once she got back in his arms, she reasoned, all would be well.
When she called her mother to let her know her decision, she wasn’t surprised at the reply.
“Well. It’s your life. You do what you think is best.”
Bronte ignored the sledgehammer subtlety. Despite the soft, controlled tone of her voice, Cathy Talbott might as well have screeched and flapped dragon wings that not in a million years would she move to another city without at least the verbal promise of a long-term commitment.
Of course, Bronte knew that quitting a perfectly good job, leaving a perfectly good, rent-controlled apartment in the West Village, and moving halfway across the country to “be with” a guy was probably not the smartest move.
At the very least, it was risky.
“A marriage proposal would be nice, for example,” her mother lobbed.
But Bronte was liberated, wasn’t she? She could pick up and move if she felt like it. She could adapt. Moving seemed like the only solution. How else would she know for sure if he was “the one”? All she had to go on was six months of panting, late-night phone calls and every other weekend spent in a mad rush of togetherness. And that was not cutting it.
And he loved her.
Suddenly, she was sick of her mother’s wisdom. Wisdom was for the timid.
“Hey, Mom, that’s my other line. I have to go. I’ll see you this weekend.”
It wasn’t really the other line, but her friend April’s desk was close enough that Bronte could give her the now-familiar rotational hand gesture for make-your-phone-ring-really-loud-right-now-so-I-can-get-off-the-damn-phone.
Apparently, that’s what mothers were for, right? To make you question (to death) every (goddamned) decision you ever made in an effort to save you from going to all the trouble of making a complete ass of yourself. Or maybe it was just enlightened self-interest on the part of mothers everywhere to save them the hassle of having to pick you up and scrape you off and listen to all the heartache (again) when “the one” turned out to be “that piece of shit” and you were left without that perfectly good job, without that perfectly good, rent-controlled apartment, and (patently) without that boyfriend.
After more or less hanging up on her mother, Bronte went into her boss’s office and collapsed with a melodramatic huff onto the chair across from the older woman’s desk. Carol Dieppe swung her ergonomically correct, black mesh chair a half-turn away from her computer screen and raised one eyebrow.
“Please tell me you are not going to move to Chicago to be with this guy.”
Bronte repressed a sigh and tried to look over Carol’s shoulder and out across the midlevel rooftops of SoHo. This was more than just a perfectly good job she was about to give up; this was the perfectly good job. Carol had faith in Bronte. She had actually negotiated two years ago to take Bronte with her from their previous advertising agency, from which Carol had been vigorously recruited.
Carol was a successful, strong, kick-ass career woman. And she was forty-eight, single, childless… even contemplating that laundry list of antifeminist claptrap made Bronte feel guilty—but why?! Was she supposed to feel guiltier because she wanted all of that supposedly antiquated nonsense?
“Fuck. What am I supposed to say?” Bronte murmured.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘I’m not quitting my job and leaving New York until he goes to Harry-Fucking-Winston and rains rose petals down on Mercer Street outside this office window that spell out “will you marry me”… in fucking italics!’ That’s what you’re supposed to say. But—”
Bronte couldn’t help laughing. Carol smiled across the desk and softened her tone, picking up a pencil and holding an end in each hand as she rotated it distractedly.
“Look, Bron. I know you think I’m some dried-up old bitch from Sex and the City, but I promise you I want what’s best for you and”—Carol held up one hand to stop Bronte from interrupting—“and… I know that what you want for you is not what I would choose for me. I mean, I am not waiting for anyone—ever!—to spell out anything in rose petals, but I know you have that dreamy, romantic, blissed-out side of you that is waiting for prince charming… that is perfectly entitled to that… but I just don’t think Mr. Texas is your man.”
Bronte sighed, audibly this time. “It’s hard enough for me to convince myself to leave all this behind, much less convince you, my mom, my friends, and my landlord, but unless I move there, how will I ever know if he’s the one?”
Carol did her best cynical stare, then dropped the pencil on her desk and raised her palms in an I-give-up gesture.
“I gather that is not a rhetorical question? Off you go then. What more can I say? I don’t ever want to say ‘I told you so,’ but if nothing else, this is going to teach you one very good lesson.”
“And what lesson would that be?” Bronte asked skeptically.
“Oh, just you wait and see.”
Bronte forcibly ignored the ominous reverberation that followed Carol’s pronouncement.
After packing up her New York apartment and transferring the lease to a friend of a friend (it’s amazing how easily a perfectly good life disassembles), the movers arrived and shipped th
e contents of said life to an apartment across the street from his apartment. This was one more layer of her idiocy: the thought that if she got her own place, she wasn’t really moving there just for him, but to have some new, important life experience too.
Crap. Double crap.
After saying all the cheerful, tearful, I-hope-I-am-not-making-a-complete-cake-of-myself farewells to friends and family, Bronte hopped a flight to Chicago and then: The Bag Incident.
The Bag Incident transpired thusly.
Having just disassembled said pretty-perfect New York City life and made the great sacrifices of quitting job and leaving family and friends, but still feeling pretty heroic and grand-gestureish about the whole thing, Bronte landed at Chicago O’Hare airport. She made it through to baggage claim and, not seeing the promised welcome wagon of Mr. Texas anywhere in sight, set about the awkward task of hauling her bag off the luggage carousel.
It was an enormous, army-green duffel bag—looking back, it kind of screamed refugee—that was stuffed to bursting with every last-minute thing that had not made it into the final boxes that she’d shipped the week before. Then she turned and he was there—her big, brawny, blond dream, waiting for her, right across the security barricade and just outside baggage claim.
How sweet was that? Coming to the airport? He didn’t need to do that in the middle of a busy workday, right? So Bronte dragged the massive duffel over to where he was standing, dropped the body bag on the ground with a thud, reached up to hug said dreamboat, and was greeted, instead, with a quick peck on the cheek and a terse, “I am in a no-parking zone so let’s step it up, darlin’.”
Those pearls of tender welcome were immediately followed by a quick pivot, the sight of a man’s strong, wide back making its confident, blond way out of the airport, and a woman and her enormous bag—and unkissed lips—left standing in said airport.
Gutted.
She always thought of a Haida dugout canoe when she thought of that word. Perfect.
Fucking gutted.
He may or may not have come back to help carry the bag—her well-honed wolf whistle may have alerted him to his slight oversight—but that was irrelevant. The reality (why hello! Nice to meet you!) slapped Bronte so hard that she never really got over it.
He didn’t give a rat’s ass whether she was there or not. If she wanted to shack up for a while, that’s cool, whatever. Move in with me. Move in across the street. That’s cool. Wherever it leads. Yeah. Right.
Wrong.
In the end—for surely The Bag Incident was the beginning of the end—it wasn’t even his fault. He had never said, “Move in with me and it will be hell-fire-kick-ass-knock-your-socks-off sex day and night followed by a lifetime of more excellent sex and marriage and children and more great sex.” Bronte had simply hoped.
She had hoped hard.
She had hoped that because she was twenty-eight and smart and independent and tall and all that, and he was thirty-five and approaching a certain age and had always told her she was cool and how they were really great together and, yeah, well, you get the picture. One of his favorite compliments had always been to tell Bronte that she was “a bit of all right”—as in “you’re a bit of all right, darlin’.”
In real life, however, it turned out that the weight of any lasting commitment could not be borne by a bit of all right. It required a boatload.
By early November, after she had tried every desperate, craving, begging thing to keep them together, bitter understanding dawned. It turned out that all of his winking and thrumming and complicit Texan drawling was not in the least bit exclusive. Not that he was cheating on her, exactly—it was just that he made every woman feel like she was the only person in the world on whom he would bestow the shining light of his goodwill.
Unfortunately, Bronte did not grasp that germane fact until she had left her perfectly good life in New York and entered his world in Chicago. She was no longer the special weekend treat but the daily routine.
Was all that shit about getting the milk for free really true? No, in her case at least, it wasn’t that—Bronte was already happily giving him the milk for free in New York and on sexy weekends elsewhere, after all—but when she was right there every minute of every day, asking about groceries and dry cleaning and whether he wanted to go to the movies on Thursday night? That just wasn’t special enough. She just wasn’t special enough.
Within days of moving to Chicago—within minutes, really—Bronte knew for certain that she had made the biggest, whoppingest, ball-out-of-the-park, shit-show mistake of her young life. The fact that whoppingest was not a word didn’t stop her from using it (repeatedly) to describe the extent of her folly.
A mere eight months ago, she had been a chic, independent junior advertising executive, dating her long-distance dream man (successful, complimentary, magnetic, all that), while living the high life in New York City: at the top of her game, so to speak.
So.
To.
Speak.
The top of her game, in retrospect, was really her ability to sustain the belief that her feelings were shared when reality lent no such credence.
Mr. Texas had even had the gall to suggest they might want to continue “fooling around” after they broke up, you know, as one does. She had never gone for the friends-with-benefits idea and certainly wasn’t going to start with, the bad boy from Midland. First of all, they were never really friends to begin with, and second of all, there was no benefit to spending time in bed worrying over why he never wanted to be more than friends.
She told him it was simply because he was a horse’s ass. The truth was that his greatest crime was being a too-potent reminder of Bronte’s emotional immaturity, but she would not come to admit that for ages.
He had been as ambivalent about breaking up as he had been about getting together. Her histrionics about the shattered pieces of her perfectly good life seemed nigh on hysterical compared to his blasé “Aw, babe, come on. It’s just fading out.”
Having no firm opposition against which to batter her breakup frustration was, at times, as depressing as the very failure of The Relationship. He did not even care enough to break up with fervor. In December, when Bronte finally accepted complete defeat, she told him, with a surprising absence of drama, that she would prefer if they never spoke again.
Bronte decided to render him permanently nameless, thus—retroactively at least—relegating him to that part of her brain reserved for The Purposely Forgotten: the bitch from tenth grade who lied and told everyone Bronte was sleeping around; the guy at Cal who had pursued her for months, finally seduced her, then never called again. Those types of people, in Bronte’s opinion, deserved perpetual anonymity. Her joking epithet, Mr. Texas, was now his permanent soubriquet.
The lingering misery came more from Bronte’s having to finally admit the extent of her own delusional stubbornness (real and vast), rather than trying to pin her heartbreak on his broken promises (essentially vague).
He loved her. So what, y’all?
January found her immersed in her new job by day and a fetid depression on nights and weekends. Carol’s words were her constant companion: Just you wait and see.
Chapter 3
By the time spring rolled around, Bronte was feeling almost forgiving (of herself, for her own idiocy). It turned out that Chicago, the city, was really not to blame for her debacle either, at least not during the months between April and October. (November through March might have added to the depth of her wretchedness, but that was just sour grapes.)
With the birds singing and the buds just beginning to bloom on the tree-lined streets of her new, cool neighborhood (worlds away from his supposedly cool but really just antiseptic, middle-aged skyscraper neighborhood), Bronte was returning to her heretofore typical optimism.
These days, she was even starting to look at the bright side of her hibernation-cum-depression of the past few months: because all food had tasted like sawdust as a result of her self-loathing
—she had lived almost exclusively on a menu of Grape-Nuts for breakfast, tuna salad (with Dijon mustard, no mayonnaise) for lunch, and the occasional salad for dinner—she was now the new-and-improved, super-skinny Bronte.
She had also managed to thrive at her killer job (what with all that free time in the evenings and on the weekends, she was like a goddamned drone). The small ad agency had a fabulous roster of clients, primarily in the fashion and travel industries, and she was just about to snag another hot new client, her fifth since moving. All of which meant if (when!) she moved back to New York, to her real real life, she wouldn’t have to do so with her tail entirely between her legs.
Relationship-wise? Yes.
Career-wise? No.
She tried to let all of that put a smile on her face as she strolled into her favorite used bookstore in Wicker Park and then wondered absently if she was too skinny. From the head-to-toe perusal she got from the Goth, pierced guy slumped over his comic book at the unvarnished plywood checkout counter, somebody seemed to think she was looookin’ gooood.
Perfect, thought Bron. Just what I need is to be attracting lascivious looks of approbation from pale, pierced twentysomethings.
Great.
So it happened that she turned toward the science-fiction section with a bit more snooty-toss-of-the-head-toward-Goth-Guy than she had intended, which just goes to show that you shouldn’t spend too much time dissing the Marilyn Manson checkout dude because your face may look bitter and pinched like that when you turn into the narrow science-fiction aisle and bump into someone actually worth smiling about. That would be the someone with the slow smile and the how-are-you, blue-gray eyes looking up from a squatted position near the bottom shelf, an open copy of Hyperion in his strong hand.