by Mindy Klasky
I was halfway to the elevator when I realized that I hadn’t watered the peace lily sitting on my kitchen counter. I’d had it for three days. I’d promised to water it twice a week, as I worked through my first milestone of the Master Plan.
Three days. What plant needed water every three days? Besides, Amy had assured me that it would let me know when it needed watering. She’d promised that the leaves would droop just a little bit, that it would clearly indicate when it was thirsty.
I was only looking for an excuse to avoid Sam. I was only trying to delay the inevitable. The plant could wait.
I took a deep breath and headed downstairs, arriving at Garden Variety about five minutes after eight. Stylishly late—that was me. This time, Timothy wasn’t waiting in the courtyard. A roll of thunder sounded as I ducked inside the restaurant. I tried not to take that as an omen.
Half of the tables were filled. A homeless woman was huddled at the table in the back, hunched over a full plate of food. Sam was seated at “my” table, right in front of the fireplace.
The sight of him stopped me in my tracks. His hair was rumpled, as if he’d run his hands through it all day long (which I was fairly certain he had.) He had draped a raincoat over the chair closest to the hearth. I recognized the Brooks Brothers garment; he’d bought it in January, spending part of his generous year-end bonus. At the time, I’d thought it was a silly expense—he rarely needed to wear a raincoat, and there were other things for us to spend money on. Like a new couch for the living room, I’d argued strenuously. One that would be free of beer stains, from one too many enthusiastic viewings of sporting events.
Obviously, I’d lost that battle. I sternly reminded myself that I no longer cared about the battered couch in Sam’s apartment. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the one in Becca’s condo.
I stood a little straighter as I stared at the man I’d thought I would marry. Sam must have had a court appearance that morning; he was wearing a suit. He’d tugged at the knot in his tie so that it hung loose.
I always loved Sam in a suit. I loved the way that he looked like a wayward little boy, like a child who had squirmed away from his mother as soon as he walked into church. I always wanted to reach out to him, to tug his lapels into shape, to tuck his escaping shirttail into his trousers.
But that was absurd. Sam was a thirty-two-year-old man. He should be able to dress like a grown-up, to make it through a workday without looking like a dark-haired Dennis the Menace.
He saw me as soon as I entered, and he flashed me the tightest of smiles. I could still remember how he used to stand when I came into the room, how he used to hold my chair. We were well past such social niceties now. No need to act out polite roles when we’d seen each other at home—flossing our teeth, clipping our toenails, going about the everyday indignities of living.
I took a deep breath and moved farther into the restaurant. Just as I crossed my fingers, ready to utter my wish mantra, Timothy emerged from the kitchen. His black hair was tousled, and he still had a three-day scruff of beard. His caramel eyes glinted as he recognized me, and his baritone “Erin!” raised an answering smile on my lips.
I was inordinately pleased that he remembered my name. It seemed like a good-luck sign, something strong enough to counter the thunderstorm that was grumbling outside. Timothy was part of my freedom-life, my independence down here in the Village. “Table for one?” he asked, glancing around to see which seats were available.
“Actually, I’m meeting a friend,” I said, nodding toward Sam.
“Great,” Timothy said, but his lips tightened a little. “I’ll be over to tell you the menu in just a moment.”
I shrugged out of my jacket as I crossed the room. It was warm inside the restaurant, and I felt my cheeks flush. I tried to tell myself that the color would look great against my blue blouse. Sam would get a strong reminder of what he was missing.
Reaching the table, I considered kissing Sam on the cheek, but that felt too friendly for my current state of mind. Shaking hands would have been absurd. I settled for fiddling with my jacket, draping it over the fourth chair with elaborate care. I concentrated on sending the message that I was busy, confident, too occupied to respond to whatever greeting Sam was offering. I was a free woman, strong and independent.
I needn’t have bothered with the stage business. Sam was glued to his BlackBerry, thumb-typing some urgent message back to his office. He pressed one final button with grim determination, and then he leaned back in his chair.
“So,” he said, eyeing Timothy’s back as the chef glided back to the kitchen. “You’re already a regular?”
I heard the jealousy larded beneath his words, and I reacted sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t remember your mentioning this place before today.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t know about it until I moved into the—” I stopped short. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t want Sam to know the name of my building. I didn’t want him to know any of my business, not while he still had that unattractive sneer on his face. “New apartment,” I finally finished.
“About that,” Sam said, and there was a nasty edge to his voice. “If you wanted to move out, you didn’t have to lie about being knocked up.”
“I didn’t lie!”
Before Sam could shout back, Timothy appeared at the table, agile as a panther. He settled a basket of bread between us, adding two tumblers of ice water. The effect was to push us into separate corners, to give us a chance to calm down, to press the reset button on our conversation.
Timothy glanced at me, his eyes unreadable, but when he spoke, his voice was a perfect model of calm professionalism. “I’ve got a green garlic soup tonight, made with chicken stock. And a green salad with sugar snap peas and a white balsamic vinaigrette.”
Sam barely glanced at Timothy. “Just leave the menus,” he said. “We’ll order in a few minutes.”
“Um, Sam,” I said. “There aren’t any menus. Timothy is telling us what’s available tonight.”
I recognized the flash of annoyance in Sam’s eyes. He didn’t like other people controlling him, didn’t like conforming to the expectations of others. All part of his Peter Pan life. Why hadn’t I realized that before? “Well,” he said, “if Timothy is telling us…”
The man in question refused to rise to the bait. Instead, Timothy held his hands loosely at his sides, as if to show that he wasn’t currently a threat. His voice walked a precisely neutral line as he said, “I’ll come back in a few minutes. Give you a chance to catch up a little more before you order.”
I wanted to tell him that wasn’t necessary. I wanted to apologize for Sam’s rudeness. I wanted to say that I was starving and I’d start with the soup, and I’d love more bread as soon as Timothy could bring it. But that wouldn’t make things any easier for the rest of the conversation I still needed to have with Sam. I settled for a quick smile, and a sunny, “Thanks!”
Where was the Tony Award I so clearly deserved?
Timothy crossed over to talk to the patrons at another table, but I sensed him watching us out of the corner of his eye. Of course he was, I tried to reassure myself. A good waiter monitors when he’s needed. A good waiter looks for the slightest sign that a patron is ready to order. A good waiter hopes that his patrons aren’t going to draw blood over the bread basket.
Sam muttered, “What kind of restaurant doesn’t have menus?”
“Come on, Sam. It’s something new. Something different.”
“Is that what this is all about? You wanted a change?” I recognized his Lawyer Voice. He was questioning me as if I were on some cosmic witness stand.
I forced my tone to stay even. “Sam, I wasn’t looking for a change.”
Just the opposite, I thought. I’d tried to settle into something permanent. Something inescapable. Something I was increasingly glad had never come to pass.
Sam glanced around the dining room, taking in the mismatched tables with thei
r eclectic place settings. I saw his gaze linger on the woman at the table by the kitchen, on her collection of bags. I could calculate the precise instant when he figured out that she was homeless. He was quicker at leaping to the truth than I had been. He sounded incredulous as he said, “It looks like you found one, though, didn’t you? But I can’t begin to figure out why you’d want it.”
And that was it. I was completely done with Sam.
As much as it pained me to admit it, Amy was right. At least where Sam was concerned. Maybe where my entire love life was concerned. I had changed myself to be with him. I had adopted his ideas of what was right, what was good. I had fallen into life on the Upper East Side like it was something that I had chosen, something that I preferred.
But I wasn’t an Upper East Side kind of girl. At least, not the type that Sam wanted me to be.
Sitting there, in the middle of Garden Variety Café, I could hardly remember the first moment that I’d thought I was pregnant, the first instant that I’d started to dream about my so-called “happy ever after” with Sam. Had I really thought that I’d find complete fulfillment doing our laundry? Cooking our dinner while he advanced his career? Giving up my career in the theater to be his wife?
And then, when Sam had called me that afternoon, just before my audition, I had actually started to slip back into those old ways of thinking. I had slid into habits so well-worn I didn’t even need to think about them. I had actually worried about being rude to him, about hanging up on him—when he had refused to take my calls for almost a week. Declined to phone me back, even after I had told him that the immediate threat was past.
Amy was right. I needed the Master Plan—more than I’d ever thought possible. I needed to figure out why it was so easy for me to cave in, to shape myself to what a guy wanted me to be.
Stunned at the truth I was seeing for the first time, I sat back in my chair. “Look,” I said. “This obviously isn’t working.” I waved my hand between us, futilely trying to encompass two years of a relationship gone bad. “We aren’t working. We probably haven’t been for a long time, but we’ve both been too busy, too wrapped up in our careers, to notice.”
“Careers?” He sounded absolutely incredulous. Not snide. Not nasty.
Just completely, one hundred percent certain that I could never achieve my dreams.
I wanted to tell him about the audition I’d had that afternoon. I wanted to tell him about Menagerie! About Laura Wingfield. I wanted to tell him that I was going to land the role of a lifetime.
But why bother? Sam had already decided that I could never succeed. He wouldn’t—he couldn’t—understand what the theater meant to me. Sam had never understood anything at all about me.
Now that I thought about it, though, that was only fair. I’d never understood him, either. I’d thought that he was a stand-up guy, the proverbial diamond in the rough. I’d figured that he’d finish playing someday soon, that he’d stop being a frat boy, that he’d be ready to man up sometime this century. I wished that I could invent a compatibility test, something as easy to use as a store-bought pregnancy test. Something to determine whether a couple had what it took to succeed in the long run—before they made the commitment to waste months on each other.
I sighed and said, “Let’s just skip the rest, okay? Let’s pretend that you’ve told me exactly what you think about my acting prospects. Let’s take it for granted that I cried. You felt bad. We both promised we’d change, and we tried for another week, or a month, or even two. But let’s just cut to the end, okay?”
He stared at me, surprise making his eyes go wide. I knew those eyes so well. I’d seen them glint with amusement, at least when we’d first met. I’d seen them laugh as he tugged me into bed. I’d seen them go hard with anger. I’d seen them narrow with shrewd appraisal.
And yet, despite how well I knew his eyes, I realized that I’d never really known Sam. Or at least the Sam I’d known was not the Sam I could stand being with. Not for the rest of my life.
He pushed back from the table. Glancing around the quirky dining room, he let a quizzical look blur his handsome features. He shook his head, started to say something, stopped. He finally settled on, “Do you have anything else you need to get out of my place?”
His place. He’d already accepted the change. He was already moving on. I shook my head. “No.”
Of course, I didn’t need to tell him that there wasn’t any paperwork. He’d never put me on the lease; instead, I’d just paid rent over to him month after wasted month. I guess I should have seen that as a warning sign, his reluctance to make anything between us official. Now, I realized there were lots of things I should have seen as warning signs.
He nodded once. “Goodbye, then. See you around.”
Not likely. Not unless he started hanging around the Equity offices. Or I lost my mind and started haunting law firm lobbies. “Goodbye.”
As I watched him collect his coat and briefcase, I tried to parse my emotions. I should be feeling anger. Embarrassment. Frustration. A long line of other negative emotions, difficult, dark feelings that I should examine, that I should store away, that I should harvest for future roles onstage. Forget about future roles—I had just enacted some strange liberation scene for Menagerie!’s Laura Wingfield, freeing myself from a fantasy version of romance, from a dream that could never exist.
I don’t know what Laura would have felt, if she’d ever figured out how to talk to a man. All I knew was that I felt relief.
The door closed behind Sam. I realized that I was holding my breath. When I exhaled, I felt an iron rod of tension melt along my spine. Suddenly, I was ready to stretch out on the broad flagstones in front of the fire. I longed for nothing more than Becca’s comfortable couch and a warm blanket, maybe a feather pillow to cradle my head.
“Some soup?” I turned away from the door to see Timothy settle a large bowl in front of me. Steam curled off the surface, carrying the fragrance of fresh garlic sprouts and an elusive hint of hot roasted chicken. I caught a breath of sherry, as well. I blinked and tried to pull myself back to the present. “You look hungry,” Timothy said, by way of explanation. He barely acknowledged Sam’s absence, taking just a moment to flick his eyes toward the now-empty chair that had held the Brooks Brothers coat.
“I am,” I said. Timothy nodded toward the bowl, indicating that I should take a taste. Bright spring garlic melted across my tongue, flavorful without being overwhelming. “This is perfect.”
“I’ve got scallops tonight. And brisket.”
I shook my head. “You know? I think I’ll just stick with the soup.”
He nodded. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“I will,” I said.
Timothy turned toward the kitchen, and I started to think about the magazines that he’d had the other night. I wondered whether he’d received the new issue of the New Yorker. But before I could ask, everything disappeared.
For just a second, I thought that I must be having some sort of delayed reaction to Sam’s departure. I certainly didn’t feel like my heart was breaking. I didn’t think that I’d suffer a stroke or an aneurysm or some other dire medical emergency, just because my boyfriend of the past two years had walked out of the room without a backward glance. I’d wanted him to go.
But I couldn’t figure out what else was going on. One moment, I was watching Timothy walk back into his kitchen. The next, I was surrounded by nothingness—a vague gray space that stretched as far as my eyes could see. The fireplace, my table, everything about Garden Variety, simply disappeared. I couldn’t see my soup, couldn’t smell it.
I staggered forward a step, surprised to find that I was standing, when I’d been sitting in the restaurant just a moment before. My feet moved; I could sense my muscles bunching, feel my toes rocking to maintain my balance. When I looked down, I could see my body, but there wasn’t anything else. There wasn’t anything beneath my feet. My belly swooped in disorientation, and I was grateful that
I’d only swallowed a single spoonful of soup.
“Hello?” I called out, hating the fact that my voice quavered. At the same time, though, I was proud that I managed to get out any sound at all. “Help?”
“I do not understand you humans!” I whirled at the voice that came from behind me. “Seven out of ten just look into the distance instead of using their time here to study the Garden!”
“What?” I asked stupidly, absurdly grateful that my eyes had something to focus on. A well-muscled man stood in front of me. His sandy hair was chopped into a brush cut, and his blue eyes were sharp enough to cut wood. He wore a gray T-shirt that was stamped Garden Athletic Department and sweatpants to match. He bounced lightly on his Nike-clad feet, as if he had just finished an invigorating run and was ready to drop and give me twenty.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to find a tattoo encircling his wrist. The flames shone particularly brightly in the neutral air around us, kindling with an orange-and-yellow light as if they glowed from within. The black outlines flickered as I stared.
“Teel?” I asked.
“You were expecting someone else?” The efficiency of his tight smile was underscored by the stopwatch that he held in his right hand. I was willing to swear that the thing had appeared from nowhere; surely, I would have seen it when I noticed the flickering flames on his wrist. He nodded as he watched the second hand tick past some noteworthy point, and then he raised his left hand to the pulse point in his neck. After fifteen seconds, he was apparently satisfied with his heart rate, because he nodded and thumbed a button on the stopwatch. “Ready? Get set, go!”
“Go where?” I asked. If I kept my gaze tightly locked on the genie, I could just avoid the queasiness that assaulted me every time I looked at the nothingness around me.
“To the Garden, of course!”
“What are you talking about?”
He bounced on his feet like an overly enthusiastic personal trainer, the kind who should be shot at dawn. “The one right in front of us!” He drilled into me with those thermonuclear eyes. “Let’s go, now. You can see it. You can make it real!”