The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  But he had said not to come back. There was no way he’d let me get near him again, and who could blame him? I had done an awful thing to him.

  After the rain stopped, I dragged my suitcases outside and went to a hotel down the street. I had a bit of money with me; it was almost a surprise to realize that I didn’t need to call anybody I knew and try to explain that I needed a place to sleep. I could stay in a hotel until I figured out what my next move would be.

  I slept on starchy white sheets in a drab brown room with the sound of traffic bleating in my ears. The next day, I called my mother from a pay phone in the lobby to tell her what had happened, fully expecting that she’d insist I come back home. She didn’t. She and my father were in the midst of their real divorce by then, and she was falling in love with a new man—“A keeper this time,” she said.

  “Oh, baby. You’re going to be just fine,” she said. “Really. I know you are.”

  “But I miss Grant,” I said. “I hurt the person who really loved me, and I want you to give me some motherly sympathy.”

  She laughed. “People who get married when they’re twenty don’t know what love even is,” she said. “Believe me, this is just part of the growing up you have to do, and I hate to say it, but it’s better you’re doing it now while you’re young than when you get old like me. I married your father at twenty, and it’s taken me twenty-three years to fight my way out of that marriage.”

  “Nobody’s mother would say that but you,” I said.

  She seemed to consider that. “That’s because I tell you the truth,” she said. “Listen. Here’s what I think you should do: take the summer to find a job you like and have some fun. And if in the fall you want to come back to California, then you should.”

  Just before I ran out of money, I got a job as a waitress in a little restaurant downtown, the kind of place where tourists gathered. I made friends with two girls there, Mona and Brianna, and the three of us lived together in Hell’s Kitchen. For a while I felt as though I were actually on an odd vacation, a vacation with a job. We lived on restaurant food and ramen noodles and Diet Coke and Pop-Tarts, and the apartment was filled day and night with music and clutter and drama. We had lots and lots of satisfying drama. Somebody was always having company, and somebody else was having a crisis or a breakup of some sort. I had never seen such an overflow of emotion, or felt so in touch with everything I was feeling.

  Nights after our shifts ended we would go to a club they knew, a place with loud, thumping music and a big disco ball that sent light spinning around the walls and floor. We smoked and drank and danced and shared clothes and makeup and food and laughter.

  Once—I’ve never admitted this to anyone, not even Magda—I went back to the old apartment, the one I had lived in with Grant, and let myself in with the spare key I’d kept. He was at work, of course. I just wanted to be reminded of him, to touch his things. I looked in the refrigerator at the foods he would eat, I ran my hand over the coffeemaker we’d gotten for a wedding present, and then I went into the bedroom and looked at his shirts hanging in the closet, all neatly in a row. The last thing I did was lie down on his pillow on the bed, the bed of a bad woman. I took my shoes off and lay there with my head smushed into his pillow, smelling him around me.

  Before I left, I did the dishes and then I cleaned the bathroom sink and the shower and left the can of cleanser on the countertop. I wanted him to wonder, to try to remember if he’d cleaned it himself. Would he think, Annabelle was here? No, certainly not. I thought of writing “I miss you” on the mirror in lipstick, but he would hate that. And he hated me anyway. Why make it worse?

  I slipped out and went back home.

  After that, I changed my look, started teasing my hair and dressing in sequins and tight pants. I learned to dance. I could carry an armload of hot plates and pour coffee into cups without spilling a drop—and every day my life as Grant’s wife and Jeremiah’s lover seemed to recede farther into the background. The only thing I didn’t seem to be able to master was caring about anybody—not in that way, as Grant had once so charmingly put it. Although there were men all over the place, I didn’t have sex. I didn’t want to. The one time I tried to sleep with a guy, I burst into tears as soon as we’d both gotten our clothes off, and he practically made skid marks getting out of the apartment.

  And then one day, just as I was beginning to get tired of living that way, Magda called me to say she was coming to New York for an interview with a small publisher who was looking for a graphic designer. She’d graduated—I realized that I, too, would have been done with college by then—and she wanted to get out of California and live on the East Coast.

  We had a hysterical reunion after her interview. She was wearing her blond hair in a pageboy and she had on a string of pearls and high heels. She did not look like the person in the dorm who could smoke the most dope without falling over, or who had once stood on my bed in the middle of an acid high and yelled that she was the long-lost love child of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

  “Look at you!” I said. “You look like the picture of young womanhood meeting corporate America.”

  “And look at you,” she said. I was wearing leggings, a bright pink blazer with shoulder pads, and a string of lime green beads, and I had my hair all frizzed up in a side ponytail tied with a man’s tie. I could tell she was making some mental adjustments about me. “You look like an artist, girl!”

  “Waitress,” I corrected her. “And perhaps disco queen.”

  I showed her around the city and took her to my apartment, where she met Brianna and Mona, who were just getting out of bed. The place smelled like stale cigarettes and old beer. Brianna was heating up some cold pizza, and Mona was searching for the aspirin bottle in a pile of laundry. Magda proclaimed it was just like our old dorm room. We gave her some comfortable clothes to put on and showed her how to use blue eye shadow to greater effect, and she acted like she was cool with everything—but I could see the surprise in her eyes when she looked at me.

  When I took her on the subway to get her back to the airport, she nudged me and said, “So which guy are you suffering from the most, Jeremiah or Grant?”

  “Neither one,” I said. “And I’m not suffering, either. I’m having fun.”

  “No, you’re not. I’ve seen you when you were having fun, and this ain’t the look.”

  I stared at the overhead posters on the subway and pretended I hadn’t heard her.

  “I don’t think Jeremiah is ever going to come through, but I’m pretty sure you could get Grant back if you really wanted to. I think it’s a good sign that he hasn’t filed for divorce yet.”

  “It’s probably just that he’s too busy to find a lawyer.”

  “But maybe that’s not the reason. Maybe he’s waiting to see if you come back. You could check it out, you know. What’s the harm in that?”

  “The harm is that I don’t want to. I’m doing fine without him.”

  “All right, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I can’t believe how you’re living! You’re not seriously thinking of keeping this up, are you? You’re just, like, slumming for now, right? Right?”

  “Actually, I keep thinking I’m going to go back to California in the fall,” I told her.

  “No, no, don’t go back. Stay here with me. We’ll do the city up right,” she said. She patted my leg. “Once I get hired at this place, I’ll get you a job, too, and you can go back to being an artist.”

  “But I might not even be an artist anymore. What have I ever really accomplished when it comes to art? Nothing.”

  “So what? Do you really think your calling is being a waitress? Is this what you actually want?”

  “The other day, I’ll have you know, I carried seven plates at one time.”

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with a comment,” she said. She looked around appraisingly. I notice she wasn’t wearing the pearls anymore, but her hair was straight and shiny and she hadn’t taken up our suggesti
ons for the blue eye shadow either. “You know, I like this city a lot. I think I’m meant to be here for a while. And who knows? Maybe I was sent here by the universe—or maybe by your mother—to help you get back on the right track.”

  “Well, it must be the universe, because I know it wasn’t my mother,” I said. “She thinks I’ve pulled off a brilliant escape act.”

  A MONTH later, Magda and I had an apartment together, and I was working at the publishing house as an assistant to the art director, a wonderful man who let me do sketches and who encouraged me, even though what I was supposed to be doing was mostly typing and filing. Magda was a graphic designer who was obviously going places, and she pushed me forward so that I kept getting more illustrating work until finally they promoted me. We were both doing well. Magda had always been more daring than I, alert to opportunities that I never noticed, and even here in New York, she seemed to have an instinct for navigating the system. She made us dress up for work every day and act professional, and she befriended the up-and-coming publishing types, people I would have written off as out of my league, because they were. We went to parties and book launches. We had our nails done. She dated lots of guys and seemed to like it that way. For a while I listlessly went out with a guy named Henry, who Magda said was a dead ringer for Grant but not quite as cute and without the advanced degree. I told her I liked him because he was too shy to do more than kiss me. Once he’d hovered his hand in midair over my breast, perhaps waiting for me to wriggle it into his waiting palm, but when I didn’t, he politely withdrew it. I’d later told Magda that that was what made Henry a perfect companion for me, and she said that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard anybody say.

  She had her own problems. She’d gotten involved with a man who wanted to get married, and she and I spent all our free time discussing what was wrong with her that she didn’t want to marry him.

  “Why don’t I feel it?” she said one evening. “I mean, he’s nice, he treats me well. He’s going to be rich, his mother likes me, and he wants to go to Paris for our honeymoon. But I just keep thinking—how do I know I’ll be able to stand him for the rest of my life?”

  “Don’t look at me,” I said. “I’m the last person who can advise somebody on this. But I will say that if you’re already thinking you won’t be able to stand him, chances are that’s accurate and you should pay attention.”

  “But I always think that. In fact, I don’t think there’s anybody in the world I could stand to be with if somebody told me I had to do it for the rest of my life.”

  “I kind of liked marriage,” I said. “There’s something really cool that happens … I don’t know … when you have a partner.”

  “Really?” she said. “So then, what did happen with you and Grant, do you think? I mean, we’ve talked all around this, but we’ve never gotten down to absolute bedrock here. What happened to your marriage? Did you just stop loving him, or did you never really love him in the first place?”

  We were cleaning up after dinner—take-out Chinese food, our favorite Sunday-night splurge. It was the night we stayed in and got organized for the week. It was funny: now that she asked me, I could remember so clearly that feeling of being bowled over by Grant. Of thinking that everything he did was funny and dorky but lovable. I thought of his large, capable hands, the way his whole serious face could light up when he was excited, even the way I felt when he’d been gone for a while and I saw him again. The way he fumbled so charmingly when he asked me to marry him. How I felt seeing him at the airport when I came to join him in New York. The safety of being with him and being completely myself, not having to fake it. How he fit with me.

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. “I really loved Grant.”

  “Until you fell in love with somebody else.”

  “Well, no, actually, you want the truth? I loved both of them, through the whole thing,” I said. “I kind of still do.”

  She laughed. “You love both of them.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They each brought out different parts of me, but I could have been happy with either of them. It wasn’t really my idea to leave Grant, even. I left him because Jeremiah was so miserable. But my choice would have been that we just kept going the way we were, with me loving both.”

  “You’re something, you know that?” she said, and she was smiling at me in amazement. “As my grandmother would say, if you don’t beat all. You can’t have two!”

  “Apparently not. But why not? They’re both such amazing—”

  “No, no, no,” she said. “This way lies madness. I think you need to decide what you really want in your life and then stop flailing around and make it happen. What is it that you, Annabelle McKay, really want?”

  “I want to go back to Grant,” I said, and I realized as I was saying it that it was true. I missed having somebody who cared about me, who wasn’t all flashing lights and craziness, a guy who came from steadiness and realness.

  “Well, that’s what you need to work toward, then,” she said.

  “No, he won’t ever take me back. The one thing he said was that I couldn’t ever come back. He might even be seeing somebody new by now.”

  “Yeah, well, until you’re divorced, everything’s negotiable,” she said.

  AFTER THAT, I decided that I would run into him on the street one day, sort of accidentally on purpose. It wouldn’t be that hard. He had habits I remembered. He liked cinnamon raisin bagels from a bagel shop around the corner from our apartment, and so for three consecutive Saturday mornings, I planted myself in the shop, hoping he would happen by. He didn’t. Then I got bolder and started loitering near his subway stop—and one rainy Friday night, bingo. There he came, holding a briefcase and an umbrella, and hurrying with his head down. He was wearing khaki pants and a rumpled blue shirt and sweater, and his hair was shining in the drippy glow of the streetlight. He walked right past me, without even looking up.

  I slunk home and told Magda that he obviously hated me.

  “I can’t believe he didn’t see me standing there,” I said.

  “Well, of course he hates you,” she said cheerfully. “You took the guy’s heart and stomped on it and then threw it up in the air and let it crash on the pavement, where you stomped on it again.” She took me by the shoulders and shook me. “Girl, you betrayed him with his best friend in the world. Would you even want a guy who would take you back right away? He’s going to ignore you as long as possible. You have to fight for him.”

  Then one day she came home and said, “Okay, I called him up today, and he’s agreed to see you.”

  “You did what?” I dropped my purse on the couch and sank down next to it.

  “I called him,” she said. “And I told him that you and he should talk again. At first he said no, but then he sighed and said okay. He wants to meet in Donovan’s Coffee Shop on Saturday morning.”

  I was sweating by the time I got there, and my hair was all wildly frizzy and curly, but he looked—I have to say—even more terrible. Like he hadn’t been sleeping or ironing his shirts. I was overdressed, but I had worn a skirt since he had always liked my legs.

  I watched how his hands shook when he tore open the little containers of cream to put into his coffee. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, but when I looked somewhere else, I could feel him studying me.

  “How’s your work?” I said.

  “Why are you still wearing your wedding ring?” He pointed at my hand.

  “I … don’t know.” I put my left hand in my lap. “How’s your work?”

  “The labor historian business has never been better.”

  “Excellent,” I said. I told him that I was “doing my art” now—a thing he’d always nagged me about.

  “And you’re living with Magda? That wasn’t the way I remembered the original plan.”

  “Yes. I guess you already knew it didn’t work out for me and Jeremiah.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “He didn’t—well, that day … he didn’t tell
Carly. He—”

  “Please.” He held up his hand. “I don’t think I can stomach the details of this.”

  “Of course not. Sorry. So how are things with you? Are you seeing anyone?”

  He stared at me for a long time before he answered, like this was an impertinent question that I had no right to ask him. Then he cleared his throat and said yes, he was seeing someone.

  “Oh, and is she living with you?”

  He shrugged. “You know I don’t really believe in that.”

  “Okay, so where did you meet her?” I stirred my coffee.

  He let a long moment go by and then he said in a low voice, “At a conference.”

  “Interesting! And now she’s in New York? Did she move here for you, the way I did?”

  “Annabelle.” He shook his head in exasperation and laughed. “She lived here all along. She’s a historian, too.”

  “So you and she … you talk labor statistics all the time? That must be fun.”

  “Why are you doing this?” he said. “For what possible reason are you doing this?”

  “Maybe I want to apologize.”

  “Totally unnecessary. You did what you needed to do. But I think the time has come that we might want to think about the future. Decide what we’re doing here.”

  “In what sense?”

  “You know. In the legal sense that we’re not exactly husband and wife, so why not make it official?”

  I took a long sip of my tea, mostly so I’d have time to think what to say. “Do your parents hate me? I’ll bet your mother told you just to go ahead and divorce me and write me out of your life,” I said. “She did, didn’t she?”

  He hesitated a moment and then nodded.

  “But your father was probably more on the side of caution. He said to give things some time.”

  “My, my. It’s as if you were in the room.”

  “Well, I’m with your father. I think we should give it more time,” I said. “I think we should go out to dinner next week and see how we feel after that.”

  “Why would we do that?”