Once More With Feeling

by Megan Crane

  ‘I’m not judging you for that, or at least, not really,’ Brooke said with a sigh. ‘I mean, what do you think my life is really like, Sarah? I’d kill to find love, and some days I think any reasonable facsimile will do. I’m not even that fussy. I just want someone who likes me a lot, who won’t become one more task I have to manage.’

  I didn’t want to talk about Tim any more, and I wanted to talk about Carolyn even less, suddenly. Even though I knew that Tim was no facsimile. I’d wanted him. I’d wanted every part of him. I hadn’t thought I’d settled on our wedding day – I thought I’d won a great prize. I hadn’t been pretending. I’d been thrilled. And I’d thought Brooke’s dress was pretty.

  But I understood that she wouldn’t believe me, even if I could bring myself to admit that now, knowing where it all had ended up. What he’d done with all those things I’d believed. Did the way things ended change the way they’d been before? Did what had happened now retroactively make everything that had gone before invalid? I didn’t think so. I didn’t want to think so.

  I walked toward her stunning array of books instead, sighing in pleasure as I reached over and traced the raised lettering on the spine of something very old and not in English.

  ‘I can’t believe that you’re single for any reason but your own personal choice to be single,’ I said after a proper moment of reverence. ‘Not you, Brooke. You always had packs of them fighting over you in the street.’

  ‘Fighting in the street, yes,’ she said dryly. ‘Over me, not so much.’

  ‘That’s revisionist history if ever I’ve heard it.’ I picked up a framed photo of some black-and-white street scene. Somewhere stark. Bold and a little bit sad. Berlin, maybe. I imagined she’d taken her own trips in these years. The way I’d wanted to do and yet had never found the time. ‘You’ve never walked into a bar in New York City without coming out with three men begging you for your number. It’s never happened.’

  That had never been my experience in the desperate wilderness that was the Manhattan bar scene. I had never exactly shone brightly under those circumstances. I had comforted myself with the knowledge that I wasn’t one for the first impression, but the long, slow build. It hadn’t really been comforting at all.

  ‘And yet somehow that has not led to lasting romantic bliss,’ she said, and when I glanced back at her she was making a wry sort of face. She caught my eye and grimaced. ‘Don’t,’ she said, holding up her free hand to stop me. ‘Don’t do the thing where you talk about how they’re all so intimidated by my poise or beauty or intellect or whatever else. That’s just not true. In the whole history of the world, that has never been true, and only women think otherwise. Men never sit around and tell each other that the hot chick at the bar failed to approach them because she was intimidated by their charm, wealth, and good looks. It would never occur to them to say something so ridiculous.’

  ‘You’re thirty-three years old,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s hardly time to decree yourself a lifelong spinster and find yourself a Boston marriage to while away your latter years, is it?’

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about it,’ she said, sounding particularly aggrieved. ‘My problem is that I’m just not gay, no matter how much I’d like to be, intellectually. Which is really too bad, because all the really interesting people I know are women. And mostly single, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘New York City is really hard for single women,’ I said helpfully. Or maybe not so helpfully, now that I heard myself say it. ‘Everybody says so.’

  ‘I don’t even think I really want to get married,’ Brooke said with a sigh. ‘But I’d like the option to mull it over at some point. To consider it carefully and come to the appropriate conclusion. You know?’

  I did know. That was exactly what Tim had given me. The option. I decided not to share that with her, either.

  I walked down the length of the shelves, amazed anew at the sheer quantity of all her books. All shapes and sizes. Paperbacks stacked on top of hardcovers. Squat, fat ones and lean, glossy ones. Art books and coffee table books next to true crime stories and the odd sculpture or photograph. So many books I’d already read, and a hundred books I wanted to sit down and read right this minute, now that I’d seen them here. She’d always had entirely too many books. They’d spilled out all over the floors and onto the windowsills and radiators in that tiny Alphabet City apartment and in the bowling alley dorm room before it. We’d lived in a precarious hazard of words.

  ‘Did you miss me?’ she asked in a small voice.

  I could hear how much that cost her – and I could feel it ricochet in me, like a bullet. And I understood, then, exactly what had happened – what I’d done. I even knew why. I’d had to step away from Brooke to figure out who I could be without her. But I hadn’t done that, had I? I’d jumped right into Tim’s world instead. I’d become Tim’s perfect wife. Tim’s partner. Lived in Tim’s dream life. Who was I, after all of that? Just some kind of demented Goldilocks creature who went around trying on whole lives as it suited me, leaving nothing but wreckage in my wake? I didn’t much like that image. But that didn’t make it any less true.

  ‘Oh, Brooke,’ I whispered, not able to look at her, too afraid I would collapse into sobs on her floor. ‘I missed you so much I had to lie to myself about it for years.’

  She was quiet for a very long time, and it took me that long to blink away the hot rush of heat that obscured my eyes and made it impossible to read the spines of the books in front of me. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Don’t do it again.’

  I smiled, and something hard seemed to melt away inside me, some wall I hadn’t realized was there until it was gone. And then, towards the end of the shelves closest to the windows, I saw them. One more thing I’d forgotten about that I knew again at a glance. The too-tall, too-thick row of them, familiar and beloved and a bit battered over the years.

  ‘Holy crap,’ I murmured in awe. In delight and disbelief. ‘Your photo albums.’

  Brooke grinned, wide.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Bring them over here. It’s definitely time for an extended trip down our own memory lane, don’t you think?’

  ‘Do you still have that horrible series of sophomore-year Halloween pictures?’ I asked. Brooke smiled serenely, which was all the confirmation I needed. ‘Because I only recently managed to get over that horror.’

  ‘You have to think of these pictures as a time capsule,’ Brooke said soothingly. ‘Nothing more.’

  I lugged an armful of the heavy albums over to the coffee table, and sat down next to her as she flipped open the first one. It was the end of our freshman year. We were dressed in men’s boxers and giant sweatshirts, with our faces covered in some kind of blue-tinted mud, standing on our narrow cots and brandishing cleaning implements as if they were swords.

  ‘Lovely,’ I said, and heard myself giggle as if I were still eighteen.

  Brooke only smiled, and turned the page, and led us back down those bright hallways into our memories, picture by picture, until it was as if there had never been any separation between us at all.

  10

  ‘Stay,’ Brooke had said later that night, when we were both becoming too sleepy to concentrate fully on the abiding horror of ourselves dressed up and out on the town as scantily clad twenty-four-year-olds. ‘As long as you want. Until you figure things out.’

  ‘You could be biting off more than you want to chew here,’ I’d replied, as cautious as I was thrilled at the invitation. At the fact that we had made it here, to this place where the invitation could be given and considered at all. ‘I’m on a mission to find myself here in the big, bad city, and as you know, that could take a while. The length of a whole sitcom series, for example, if you’re not careful.’

  I had been trying to make her laugh, but she didn’t.

  ‘Stay,’ she’d said again instead, her voice lower that time, and for a moment something had shimmered between us, fragile and good
and threaded through with the reasons I had loved her so much for so long, and I stayed. Of course I stayed.

  I never wanted to leave.

  Staying with Brooke – living with Brooke – was like slipping into an old pair of jeans that I’d been sure I’d completely outgrown, only to find they fitted me as beautifully as I remembered they had in their heyday, however worn and patched they might be now. I thought there might be some awkwardness between us – some build-up of all that tension we’d managed to accrue before we’d lost track of each other years before. I thought that maybe that first night was a fluke – that when we strayed back on to heavy topics, as we were more likely to do than not, we might stay there and I’d remember all the reasons I’d torn myself away from her before.

  But that didn’t happen.

  And we talked. We talked about everything. What we’d been doing with ourselves. What we wanted to do with ourselves. Old dreams and new ones and if I had a zillion dollars and no responsibilities ones. We both wanted to move to a Hawaiian island, for example, despite the fact that neither us had ever set foot on one. We agreed that that was irrelevant. We talked through all our old escapades, careening around lower Manhattan like fools, and too many silly evenings to count. We levied very old accusations and retold very old, still only funny to us, jokes. We relearned our old language of stories and signs, glances and innate understandings. Within a few days, it felt as if we were close enough to fluent again.

  Brooke went to work each day and I continued exploring the city neighbourhoods I thought were most likely to lead me somewhere, that loomed largest in my memories. Anywhere that I thought resonated inside of me. I looked for that click I’d felt in my freshman year when my parents had dropped me off in front of Washington Square Park. That instant, irrevocable understanding that I’d finally come home. I looked for it everywhere, up and down the avenues, in and out of the side streets. I spent a lot of time traipsing around in the cold, in the snow, in the freezing rain. I took to the streets of Manhattan like some kind of possessed creature, so sure I would run myself down on some corner somewhere if I could only find the right one. And I was determined to find it.

  I met up with all the New York friends I’d lost touch with after I’d moved off to the suburbs. It was as if I’d raced out of the city like a refugee when I’d left, and had never bothered to look back over my shoulder to see what was behind me. I shouldn’t have been so surprised to discover that what was behind me was perfectly fine. Nice, even. Making me wonder what, exactly, I’d been so afraid of. I made my lawyer friends weep with laughter over my tales of Benjy Stratton and other such luminaries of the Rivermark drunken-driving scene. I knew they didn’t envy the tedium of my cases, but by the same token I didn’t envy them their institutionalized panic over things like their billable hours, much less the leashes their firms kept them on. I caught up with so many of my old college friends that it started to feel like an extended reunion. And the best part was, while I did all of this, I got to live with Brooke again. It was almost as if we were ten years in the past, with a much fancier apartment and Brooke’s lovely, desperately fashionable wardrobe shared between us this time.

  So ten years ago, but better.

  ‘You can buy clothes if you want,’ she’d said that first morning, when I’d pointed out that I hadn’t really planned any of this too well and had only brought a just in case change of underwear and a toothbrush with me, stashed away in my purse. ‘Or you can help yourself to my closet.’ She’d smiled. ‘Just like you used to. And the same rules apply. If you stretch out anything with those boobs of yours, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Noted,’ I’d said dryly, eyeing her perky little A cups as she crooked a brow at my far more unmanageable Cs. And in her clothes, somehow, I felt more like myself and less like whatever I’d been before – frumpy, scruffy, significantly less contortiony than Carolyn.

  We laughed so much we convulsed. So much it actually hurt. We watched all the old movies we could remember loving so much in college and those mad twenties years afterwards, and found we could still quote them all almost verbatim. We sat in her beautiful living room in front of the fire and read books, as snow drifted down outside the windows.

  Brooke was so refreshingly the same, I thought one afternoon as she worked from home. So far, working from home for her meant settling in with a virtual stack of manuscripts to edit on her e-reader while fielding several calls from the office. I lay on the floor near the fire and paged through her beat-up copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which we’d both loved beyond reason in our junior year of college. But I wasn’t concentrating on the words in front of me, I was listening to Brooke. I heard my old friend in the way she laughed, or the lightness in her tone here and there, but there was so much more to her now. I could hear the authority in her voice now, the easy confidence that rolled off of her in waves. She was in control. In charge. She had come into her own, clearly. I had no doubt at all that she was good at what she did and more than that, loved doing it, and I knew without having to indulge in any desultory self-examination that the same was not true of me. I did not have that particular air. I was not as firmly set into the choices I’d made, so much so that I now bloomed from within them. I didn’t have that kind of confidence, and I wondered, more pointedly than before, if I ever would.

  One day, she decided it was time to deck the halls in deference to the fact that it was her year to host her family’s Christmas morning get-together the following week. We acted out the stereotypical New York City Christmas scene, slipping down the icy sidewalks with a pine tree between us, then wrestling it up the stairs and into her apartment. It lacked only the Harry Connick Jr soundtrack, which we quickly remedied inside as we hauled out the decorations and got to work. Later, Brooke insisted that we hit up the famous tree at Rockefeller Center, hot chocolate in hand, and I belatedly realized what she was up to.

  ‘You are trying to seduce me into moving back here,’ I accused her in a mild tone, as we gazed at the skaters packed into the ice rink. I took a sip of my hot chocolate and wished for marshmallows as well as whipped cream the way I always did. ‘You are taking me on the glossy picture-postcard tour of the city.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Brooke replied blandly, rolling her own cardboard grande hot chocolate between her palms. ‘My entire life here revolves around tourist attractions these days. I meant to mention that before.’

  I didn’t have to look at her to know we were both grinning.

  This is perfect, I told myself as I battled my insomnia on the pull-out couch in Brooke’s den. We’re making up for lost time and it couldn’t be more beautiful. More right.

  And that was true. Of course it was.

  Did you disappear into the city again? Lianne texted. I hate it when that happens. Like that entire decade.

  Just visiting, I assured her.

  I told myself I didn’t actually know if that were true. That I didn’t know what I wanted.

  But the greater truth was that I wanted to disappear. I wanted this New York City life back – all the different parts of it. I wanted Brooke back, and the rest of my friends, and I wanted to be a part of the magic of the city again, the way I had been before. I wanted late nights at the gay bars and long mornings at the charming cafes, surrounded by so many like-minded strangers. I wanted the dirt, the struggle, the thrusting majesty of the skyscrapers. I wanted to be carried away in the pace of it, the energy. I wanted the city to define me, so I wouldn’t have to worry so hard about doing that for myself. I wanted the person I’d been when I’d lived here before to come back, to take me over with her drive and energy and endless access to all those wild and impossible dreams.

  I wanted to be myself again. I wanted that more than anything.

  And I wanted to feel more at home here in New York than I ever had anywhere else. I wanted to feel it in my bones, a deep knowing stamped in the marrow. I wanted to feel sure again. Ready to move in and get back down to the bus
iness of living life the way I’d always planned I would. At peace again. Home.

  And I refused to admit to myself that I didn’t.

  ‘When are you coming back to Rivermark?’ my mother asked one morning when I’d been back in the city for going on five days, in that brisk tone of hers that suggested annoyance without actually sounding annoyed. It made me regret picking up the phone at all. Dealing with anything and everything back in Rivermark made my attempts to sink back into this New York life all the more difficult, and it was easier to resent her for that than question it. So I went with it.

  ‘I don’t know that I am,’ I told her, fighting to maintain the calm and reasonable tone I knew she preferred. ‘There’s nothing for me there, is there? Why would I rush back to participate in that awful little triangle, arranged around Tim’s bedside like a bad reality show? Maybe I’ll just stay here instead. Everybody wins.’

  I assumed that she would tell me if anything new, or bad, had happened in my absence. I refused to ask. I would not ask about Tim’s health. His current prognosis. I would not ask about Carolyn’s attempt to play the good wife. I would not ask.

  But it surprised me how much I wanted to know.

  I stood by Brooke’s wall of windows and let the sharp winter sun fall over me, lighting me up. I pretended it could reach inside and wash me clean. I pretended it could make me over into nothing but sunshine. I pretended I could feel that way, right now, right here, my mother and the things she stirred in me be damned, simply by wishing it.

  ‘It’s not like you to stick your head in the sand, Sarah,’ Mom said, in a strange moment of unexpected incisiveness. As if she could actually see me or sense, somehow, what I was doing – what kinds of things I was telling myself. In fairness, her tone was not particularly nasty. But I bristled anyway.