Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  “I didn’t know that you knew,” I say, my voice soft. “I thought that she was hurting you, cheating on you. You wanted to get married . . .”

  “I know, Rachel. I wanted to get married. She didn’t want to get married. We both were coming to a place of agreement that while we separately had preferences, that not getting married worked for us better than walking down the aisle. I want Arianna as she is, not shoving herself into my wants or other people’s expectations. I don’t want her to change or see marriage differently, because then she wouldn’t be Arianna. She wouldn’t be the person I fell in love with. And doing something solely for another person despite your own feelings doesn’t breed love. It breeds bitterness.”

  I suddenly wish that I had heeded Adam’s advice. He had warned me that I only knew part of the story. I somehow forgot that in my anger this morning. In my self-righteousness. I take out the facts that I had been sweeping under the rug in my anger. That Noah kissed Arianna. That she hadn’t really kissed back.

  “Ethan, I’m really sorry that I got involved. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Please tell me what I should do.”

  The anger is back in Ethan’s voice as he tells me not to do anything, to leave them alone. And then the phone call ends with a snap, a final click, a closed door. I feel physically ill, and I do what a New Yorker never, ever in a trillion year does—I hold onto the railing. I touch that filthy span of paint-chipped metal to steady myself, probably getting gangrene at the same time. Which would only make my day marginally worse.

  I want to go back to my apartment, kick off my shoes, which have now literally made my toe numb, and crawl under the covers never to emerge again. But the wedding is in a few weeks, and I have to put in the stupid flower order if I want us to carry bouquets. I allow this internal battle between wanting to call the day over before noon and tending to the rest of my to-do list rage for at least three minutes while people move around me, staring at my hand against the railing as if I can’t quite believe that it belongs to me, that it’s attached to my arm, that this is my life, that I have messed it up this much just a few weeks before I walk down the aisle for the second time. When I need my best friend and brother the most.

  I finally head down into the subway feeling as if everyone around me knows. I rationally know that they can’t possibly be privy to all the various ways I have imploded my closest relationships, but I feel so enormously guilty that I can’t believe that no one can read these thoughts right off my face. How is it possible that I could be this tumultuous on the inside and have no one else around me notice?

  I get off near Lisbeth’s apartment and decide to go grab her for fortification before I head to the florist. It is too early to try Adam’s cell phone, which he only turns on during lunch, and I need to talk to someone before I explode.

  I take off my shoes once I get inside the building and walk up to her apartment barefoot, trying to remember if we’re the same shoe size, and whether it would be gross to ask her if I can borrow a pair. I just need someone to take pity on me during this terrible day.

  She opens the door after a knock or two, as if she’s expecting me. “Rachel.” She says my name as if she is decidedly unthrilled to see me. “I just got off with Cory from the New York Times.”

  I have no clue who Cory is, and it takes my brain a good thirty seconds to scan backwards to Anita and her obsession with getting our story into the Sunday Styles. Puppy yaps from the bedroom. “Oh,” I say, dropping my shoes on the floor.

  “You had no right to give him my phone number,” Lisbeth begins. “We’re not interested in being the gay poster children for marriage equality. And Emily certainly doesn’t want her patients thinking about her personal life while they’re on the table. She doesn’t put herself out there like you do on your blog.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, thinking that I’ve never had a day when I’ve uttered these two words so many times. “I didn’t know that it would bother you. I thought you’d be happy to be interviewed. It was Anita’s idea.”

  “Anita? My mother? My mother suggested that you give Cory my number?”

  “Well, no. I mean, your mother had the idea to put Adam’s and my story in the Sunday Styles section.”

  “Exactly,” Lisbeth tells me. “My mother wanted your story, not mine. My mother is not interested in my wedding, especially if she doesn’t get a say in where we hold it or who officiates or who designs our dresses. My mother has no interest in actually getting to know Emily, in hearing what we want and helping us create it. She is only interested in imposing her ideas on our life without any regard to who we are as individuals or a couple.”

  “I don’t think that’s really fair,” I say, obviously not learning my lesson about staying out of people’s lives. I am rewarded for my comment with a frustrated snort in my direction.

  “I’m sure you know my relationship with my mother better than I do,” Lisbeth says. “I think it’s great that you’ve let Anita into your wedding planning, and I’m sure that your Sunday Styles spread is going to be fantastic, but I don’t really want your sloppy seconds of my mother’s terrible ideas.”

  I slip my feet back in my shoes, at this point certain that I’m not only not going to ask to borrow a pair of slides or sneakers or mukluks—not that Lisbeth would wear mukluks even in the iciness of hell freezing over—but I’m also not going to be unpacking my arguments with Arianna or Ethan with her. I’m not going to be asking her to come with me to the florist. I’m going to be slinking away from yet another mess.

  “My mother has no interest in having our story in the New York Times,” Lisbeth shrills. “Why should she? She doesn’t even know our story.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mutter. “I’ve obviously messed up, and it won’t happen again.”

  Lisbeth doesn’t even ask me why I’ve come to her apartment nor does her face soften as I reach for the door knob, step back out into the hallway, and go to choose tulips on my own, not 100% certain there will even be anyone in my wedding party to hold them.

  I AM PRETENDING that this day hasn’t happened. I ditched the rest of my to-do list, including the next-to-impossible task of finding an officiant at short notice, and slink back to my apartment so I can patch up my toe and feel sorry for myself. If my foot hadn’t hurt so much, I would have stopped by a bodega for a bag of chips, a Snickers bar, anything greasy or sweet and firmly on the don’t-eat-before-your-wedding list. But instead, after I’ve changed into sweatpants and affixed a Band-Aid, I’m forced to forage from our pantry, so I grab a jar of olives, making myself sick sucking the meat off the Kalamata pits.

  I curl up on the sofa underneath a blanket with the Food Network mutely telling me how to prepare a completely authentic, low-calorie Mexican meal, my computer on my lap as I surf through websites, barely registering any of the words. I know I should get that top post off my blog, tell everyone about the engagement, but I’m too busy throwing myself a pity party to write. I mentally set up a violinist in the corner of my brain, providing a soundtrack as I run through all the various people who are furious with me, adding myself to the list for good measure. At least they don’t have to spend time with me for the rest of the evening, I sniff. I am stuck with myself.

  I’m about to click off one gossip site and click onto another when I sit up suddenly and yell at the screen. The announcement of the Volt couple. The Vouple. Their faces shine out at me from the screen, grinning hugely as they hold up their entwined fingers to not only point out the cohesion of their relationship, but also the ring now adorning the woman’s left hand. The West Side location fought back hard with multiple couples probably proposing before they were ready just for the chance to become the couple featured in the Sunday Styles. If I had allowed Cory to interview me, my story would have probably ended up being bumped anyway. I lick salty Kalamata brine off my thumb and feel sorry for myself.

  Seeing the hap
piness of the couple makes me miss Arianna even more. After I ordered the flowers, I considered stopping by their apartment on my way home, trying to assuage things with both my brother and best friend at the same time. But what could I really say? Sorry that I accused you of having an affair when it was really just Noah being a dick and hitting on you? Sorry that I’ve been judging you all of these months? Sorry that the way I avoid dealing with my own problems is to try to fix everyone else, even if they don’t think they’re broken?

  I didn’t think saying any of those things would actually make things better. Messing up on this grand a scale requires time and a lot of apologies. It’s not something I can fix in an afternoon, even if I promise never to insert myself into their relationship again or even to try to comprehend another person’s couplehood.

  Relationships are incomprehensible, I decide as I fish another olive out of the jar, flicking brine on my keyboard. It stands beyond reasoning how any other two people mesh their lives together. Somehow at least 50% of us make it work, but even so, the only thing I have learned about marriage is that I know nothing about marriage. I don’t even have a firm grasp on how things are unfolding in my own relationship much less anyone else’s.

  Staring at the ill-timed Vouplehood announcement, I realize that I can’t even send her an email or a text message about it. It feels as if a door has not only been closed but locked for good measure. I dramatically bookmark the page, punctuating the task with a lot of loud sighs, on the off-chance that there is a point in the future that I can send it to her, not that she wouldn’t already know about the couple by the time that day rolls around.

  Adam texts me to say that he’s a few blocks away, picking up shampoo and wants to know if I want anything else. He has no idea what sort of day I’ve had, what I’m about to unload on him when he walks in the door. I considered calling him at lunch time, but I knew that I would need more than a half hour in order to calm down. Everything feels so tenuous today that I feared that I might mess up this relationship too by being thoughtless and dumping on Adam while he has papers to grade or an essay prompt to prepare, especially since everything still feels so raw, even though I’ve now accepted his engagement proposal for real. I snuggle down into the blanket, hopeful that he’ll be home soon, will take one look at me, and know that I need someone to take care of me even without saying anything. He’ll understand that I never meant any harm.

  When my phone buzzes, I assume that it is Adam with a question, but my heart sinks when I see my mother-in-law-to-be-again’s name. With the day that I am having, any phone call from Anita cannot be good. At the very least, she is phoning to tell me that she has a problem with our seating chart, and at the most, she is calling to tell me that I’ve committed an enormous sin that I cannot even begin to fathom. I answer it instead of letting it go to voicemail in order to pack all my unpleasantness into a single day rather that stretch it further into the week.

  “Hello, Anita,” I say, trying to keep my voice even.

  “I just got a call from my friend, Alicia Abramson. She told me that Cory told her that you refused to do the Sunday Styles story months ago, and it won’t be in the paper in a few weeks. Rachel, I have no clue why you’d embarrass me like that after I did this for you, calling in a favor to the New York Times.”

  On another day, I probably would have groveled, apologizing profusely for damaging her impeccable reputation on the Amagansett social scene and actually feel twenty kinds of sheepishness. But everyone else beat that out of me, and poor Anita gets instead the sound of me sucking in a chestful of air so I can release several months’ worth of tension in her general direction.

  “Anita, I’m sorry you’re upset. I didn’t refuse to do the story. I had second thoughts about putting our story out there so close to the release of the book.”

  “But that was the whole point! I was trying to get you publicity for your book.”

  “I know that, and I am grateful, Anita. If it was a different book, it would have been perfect, but I didn’t know if an article about our love story would help convince people that I have something to say about divorce. And I don’t want to sweep this under the rug, or pretend that it didn’t happen. Adam and I divorced, and getting remarried doesn’t erase that fact. It will always be part of our history.”

  “I wasn’t trying to pretend it didn’t happen,” Anita admonishes.

  “I wasn’t saying that you were. I’m saying that I may have been doing that, seeing the divorce as being undone with this wedding, and I had a lot of fears about losing the lessons we gained from that moment in time. And regardless, I didn’t refuse to do the interview. I told Cory that I thought Lisbeth has a better story.”

  “She is not going to like that one bit. She is going to be furious if you gave her name to him. She doesn’t want to be held up as the example of lesbian America. And Emily is much too private to put their story out there.”

  Had Lisbeth said this before? Had I just missed it? And how had Anita caught it—clueless Anita with her distraction jewelry and lunches at BLT Market and Amagansett real estate stories?

  I swallow several of my words as I realize in that moment how wrong I have had this. It’s like watching a photo montage of my life, with all the connections being drawn out for me visually. Could it be that Anita isn’t clueless at all, foisting her strange societal laws on us? She isn’t ignoring who we are even if it appears that way? My heart stops as I realize that she is literally giving us exactly what we want: I have a book coming out, and she picks up on the fact that I’m concerned about it doing well, so she calls in a favor to get me some publicity. It isn’t her fault that her knowledge ends there and doesn’t incorporate the conversation with Amy Appelstein and the one hundred misgivings that came after the initial excitement. And she knew that Lisbeth would despise being part of the very same article, hence why Anita didn’t suggest it. She was correct, again, only up to the part of the story she could see and didn’t know how Lisbeth took the action to be one more way that Anita shut her out.

  It isn’t Anita’s fault if she reads our signals and translates them into action; if she sees how Lisbeth holds her at arm’s length and in turn gives her the space she thinks Lisbeth wants. If she picks up on the fact that I pretend to be the type of woman who would be impressed by an invitation from Mrs. John L. Strong when I’m in front of her, listening to her Amagansett stories with fake rapt attention to be polite. She is just handing us back exactly what we put out there, either because we’re afraid of getting hurt or because we think it’s the kind thing to do. These are all truths too, just as much as the information we keep from her.

  I rub my fingers over my eyes as Adam enters the apartment. I mouth his mother’s name, and he holds out his hand for me to give him the phone, silently offering to deal with Anita so I don’t have to. But this is one more place where I have to apologize as well as a place that I can maybe fix at least one of my problems.

  “I wish that I had spoken to you about this before I told Cory, because I did pass along Lisbeth’s name and number.”

  “Oh no, Rachel, no no no. She is going to be furious.”

  “You’re right. She is furious. He called her today, and she rejected the article idea.”

  Anita clucks as if to tell me with this sound that she knows best. Which is not always the case either, though this time, she is absolutely correct.

  I decide to take a gamble, hoping it will pay off even though nothing else has gone right today, so I have no reason to believe that this will either. “Anita, I should have listened to you, but you also have to listen to me. You need to jump in there and help Lisbeth and Emily with their wedding. Adam and I will be fine, and most of our to-do list is finished anyway.”

  “Lisbeth doesn’t want me to help,” Anita says stiffly.

  “You’ve been right about so many things, Anita, and I can see how you would think that bas
ed on Lisbeth’s behavior. But she doesn’t know how well you know her, how much you’ve noticed. She thinks that you’re not interested in her life, in who she is as a person.”

  “But that couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Anita sniffs. “I am interested in her life. She just doesn’t let me get close.”

  “I know,” I say simply. “But I think that’s just a defense mechanism because she wants very badly to be close. All she wants is for you to call her and ask her out to lunch, to just sit and really listen.”

  “I want to throw her the wedding of her dreams,” Anita says. “Her Four Seasons, white tulle gown wedding. I’ve stockpiled three issues of Creative Bride, for weddings off the beaten path. I even folded over a page on bridal shower desserts that could be tweaked to have copies of some of her prints hand-painted onto fondant.”

  I raise my eyebrows at the idea of eating Lisbeth’s prints off of a cake, but I say nothing. My gut tells me that I’m on the right path; that this hopefully won’t backfire later. I nod even though Anita can’t see me through the phone. “I don’t think either of us realized how closely you’ve been listening. Please call her, Anita, and tell her why you sent Cory to me instead of her.”Adam sits down across from me, somewhat astonished from the end of the conversation he could hear. He takes the phone out of my hand and sets it on the table after I hang up, which is the only motion I need to tip me over the edge and start bawling. He wraps his arms around me, pulling me into his chest, and I bury my nose in his shirt, which smells like the popcorn the kids make in the microwave in the student commons after school.

  “What was that all about?” he asks.

  “Adam, I have had the world’s worst day. I’ve messed up everything.”

  “My little Emma,” Adam sighs, channeling one of my favorite Jane Austen books. And I know in that moment that he’s right, except instead of making love matches, I have been inadvertently seeing love problems where maybe none really exist: between Ethan and Arianna, between Anita and Lisbeth, between myself and the idea of marriage. What I didn’t realize in all my convictions that relationships are always doomed to unravel or be peppered with misunderstandings is that they also can be rebuilt stronger and with greater comprehension of the other person.