“Will you say something?” he said again.
There was that familiar heaviness, like someone sitting on her head. It was so heavy that she forgot everything else. Suddenly, the cracks in the plaster on the wall fascinated her.
“This has nothing to do with me,” she said. “I have to go. I have to get back inside.”
“Pru,” he said, then stopped.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Can you just . . . can you slow down for a minute?”
“What do you want? Permission? Forgiveness? Advice?”
“Listen, I don’t have it all figured out. All I know is, I had to talk to you. Tell you everything. Isn’t that right?”
“John,” she said, “we were together for one night. You don’t owe me anything.”
“What would you have me do?”
“That’s just not relevant,” she said.
“It is, to me.”
“Then,” she said, “I’d say, you have to try again with Lila. You’ll never know, if you don’t. And no matter who you love after that, you’ll always wonder whether you did the right thing.”
“And us?”
“There’s no ‘us.’ There’s a last night. That’s all.” She bit her lip, waiting for him to tell her she was wrong. That, of course, there was an us, and that he didn’t want Lila or Gaia or anybody else. That he wanted her, only her. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything.
“John, I have to go. Annali’s awake,” she lied. “The phone must have woken her up.”
“All right,” he said. He sounded tired. “Pru, I’m so sorry. You know I didn’t mean to hurt you, right? Especially so soon after-”
“John, it’s fine. I’m fine, really. I don’t have any expectations of you. You’re not my boyfriend, we just fooled around. That’s all.”
“Pru—”
“I’ve gotta go,” she said. “I hope everything works out.”
THE NEXT DAY SHE WENT TO EDIE’S AND TOLD HER SHE’D work for her during the holiday season. Then she went with McKay to see a house in Cleveland Park.
It was a huge old three-story on a good street, in beautiful condition. She wondered how McKay and Bill could afford it. They sat on the couch in the sun room, facing the blank television, for a while. Then the agent, a friend of McKay’s, took them into the master bedroom suite. The suite’s bathroom featured a huge, black whirlpool tub.
McKay and Pru climbed in the tub, to see if they could both fit. They sat facing each other, and the tub was so big their feet didn’t even touch. The agent went off to take a phone call, and McKay called after him, “Bring us cocktails!”
“I think I did something stupid,” Pru said, when they were alone.
“Uh-oh. Did we wander off the subject of you for a moment?” Then he saw her face and said, “Oh, sweetie. What happened?”
“I slept with John Owen,” said Pru.
McKay blinked a few times. “Okay,” he said. “So far that sounds like a good thing. A great thing.”
“And I think I’m in love with him.”
“Well, that is stupid, I must say. Sex with someone you love— yuck.”
“And now his wife wants him back.”
“Oh. And?”
“And I told him he should go back to her.”
“You didn’t.”
“I practically sent him off with my blessing.”
“Did you tell him you were in love with him?”
“No. But I’m sure he must know.”
“Bad assumption,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Listen, if he’s not sure he wants me, then I don’t want him.”
“Don’t lie to me, Pru. I know you too well.”
“I mean, I don’t want him to do anything on account of me. He needs to figure out where he is with Lila. And if he wants to be with her, he should be with her. And if he doesn’t, well, he needs to say so.”
“You didn’t give the guy a thing, did you? You just threw him back to the sharks, with no escape route?”
“I thought this notion of dating as a game was outmoded.”
“You thought wrong, sweetheart. And it’s not a game, it’s a war. Winner take all.”
“Thank you, Joan Collins.”
“Anyway, I’m not saying play a game. I’m saying give the guy something to hold on to. He’s floundering out there, and you throw him a stone. I mean, what if this guy is your destiny? Are you going to give up on your destiny so easily? On your whole future? On your children’s future?”
“What if I’m not up to my own destiny?” she said. “What if I’m the wrong girl for my destiny?”
The real estate agent came back into the bathroom. “What do you think?” he said, brightly. Of course he was from McKay’s vast network of gay professionals and friends. On the ride over to the house in his BMW, Pru saw a plastic Playskool phone, the kind with the smiley face on the dial. While they were driving, he’d snatched up the receiver and said, Hold all calls, Joyce! Gay men, she had noticed, were in fact an extraordinarily happy bunch. Maybe there was something in all that sleeping around and staying friends, spending their disposable income on toys and cars.
McKay scootched over in the bathtub. “Let’s see if you can get in here, too,” he said to the agent.
JUST BEFORE MC KAY DROPPED HER OFF AT HOME, HE said, “Listen, we’re really getting married. In the spring, in Provincetown. Put it in your planner.”
Pru looked at him in surprise. “Really? That’s exciting.”
“I don’t know. I’m worried that this is all because we’ve gotten to be a boring old couple, and we need to do something for excitement. Do you think that’s why?”
“I don’t think Bill finds you boring,” said Pru. “I think you guys are crazy about each other.”
“Well, he’s stuck with me,” said McKay. “Anyway, we were hoping you’d be in the wedding.”
“You know I will. Always the bridesmaid.”
“I hope it was okay to tell you. I know it’s a little weird.”
“No, it’s okay,” Pru said. “I guess I better get used to it. Even my gay friends are getting married before I do. And it’s not even legal in forty-nine states.”
Seventeen
Nadine liked to say, among other things, “When a door closes, a window opens.”
This had never seemed like a particularly good deal to Pru. What was a window, after all, compared to a door? A window was smaller and not always where you could reach it. It wasn’t intended to get you out of the house, in case of a fire. In fact, it had probably been painted shut by the previous owners. She had to guess that her mother’s point was: In a real pinch, it’ll do.
Edie was happy to let Pru help out at the shop over the Christmas rush and then stay on after the holidays. Her father was ill and she was having a hard time taking care of him while working at the store. She taught Pru how to handle the merchandising, and how to use her financial software. Pru was glad to have even a little more money, so that she didn’t have to draw on the inheritance she’d received when Leonard died. Christmas and Annali’s birthday had pretty much wiped out her severance. She bought extravagant presents for everyone, hoping to fill up the big empty holes in their lives.
Working at the shop gave her a reason to get dressed and out of the house. Patsy had signed on with one of the temp agencies in town, and most days they had something for her. She would get calls to report to the downtown law offices, where she typed up documents and did filing. She learned not to let on that she could probably fix the copy machine, whenever it broke. The lawyers she worked with liked flirting with her. With her jumble of hair and her nose ring, and her utter lack of interest in the partners, she stood out like an exotic bird next to the grimly hardworking, black-suited women of the firm. A couple of the partners had even asked her out, but she always said no. Patsy found lawyers reprehensible.
Patsy left first in the morning, so she could take Annali to preschool before heading downtown f
or her current assignment. Pru had a nice hour or so alone to herself, to read the paper, walk the puppy, and drink coffee. Then she walked down Connecticut to Edie’s, where she’d help the few customers who’d wander in, or work on organizing the stockroom or Edie’s hopelessly tangled finances. Edie came in sometime in the early afternoon, after settling her father down for his nap. Pru was glad to have coworkers again. There was the little guy, Paco, who folded the clothes, and Edie, and the stylists at the hair salon across the street, and the Vietnamese women in the nail salon upstairs. “Good morning, sweetie,” they said to each other, and “Pretty,” touching each other’s clothes, and, yawning, “Lord, I’m tired.” It seemed to Pru that they spent a lot of time walking around, yawning, touching things, and saying, “Lord, I’m tired.” They made excursions for coffee and lunches. Mai came down looking for an aspirin. Pru ran over to the hair salon when she needed change.
She even had her own regular customer. Her name was Lola, and she was about ninety years old. She told Pru that she used to be Eleanor Roosevelt’s press secretary. Her ankles were swollen, but she liked to try on the highest pumps she could find. She was barely able to stand in them. Pru had to hold her arms and help her up from the chair. Lola would stand for a few seconds in front of the mirror, and then sigh deeply. “I used to have the most gorgeously turned ankle,” she said. She had Pru bring her clothes that she could never wear in public, long, revealing columns of silk that exposed her leathery décolletage, her liver-spotted arms. She looked like a dried moth in a butterfly’s wardrobe. She spent a long time looking at herself in the mirror, then asked Pru or Paco to get her a cab. Lola always gave them five dollars for performing this service, which they would accept, and use to buy chocolate from the gourmet chocolatier around the corner.
At four o’clock Pru would walk home, back up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped to pick up Annali from preschool, then they’d take the puppy to the playground, where sometimes they’d find Fiona and her kids. Fiona wasn’t showing yet, but she looked pale, nauseous, and exhausted. They passed the time by pushing the kids on the swings and trying out baby names: Delia. Cornelius. Cady. Lionel. Then it was home to make dinner, listen to Patsy complain about the capitalist swine she worked for, and perform the extensive, rather exhausting ritual that was Annali’s bedtime routine. If she was lucky, she could fit in a swim there somewhere. If she was really lucky, she didn’t go through her whole day thinking constantly about John Owen.
ONE NIGHT WHEN SHE WAS HIDING IN THE BATHROOM, crying, she had a realization.
She hid in the bathroom to cry because she was still trying to keep it together in front of Patsy, who was just getting herself together. She’d always had the idea, as far back as she could remember, that she had to set an example for Patsy. She didn’t want Patsy to hear her cry, because she didn’t want her sister to start indulging her grief all over again, and because she didn’t want to have to answer any questions. The walls of the apartment were paper-thin. In the bathroom she clenched and unclenched her hands, and when it seemed unbearable, as though she was going to burst from not crying, she watched the girl inside her cry. Pru made her double over, hands over her eyes, going hell for leather with the weeping. Always in a gray belted dress, her hair in a forties-style up-do, a handkerchief clutched in her hands. She looked like she was crying for a dead soldier. Pru would watch her cry, and afterward come out to Annali and Patsy, who never seemed to notice anything strange about these extended bathroom retreats.
She missed John. She missed talking to him and seeing him every day. He never called her again, after that last phone call, asking her what he should do. She tormented herself, wondering whether McKay had been right. Maybe she should have let him glimpse her heartbreak. Maybe she should have yelled at him, scolded him for what he’d done to her. Since she hadn’t heard from him, she had to assume that he’d gotten back with Lila. But she couldn’t bear knowing, right now. She avoided his corner of Adams-Morgan, orienting her daily life in the other direction, westward, toward Dupont Circle. She even began shopping at the other Safeway, the smaller one, and took her clothes to a different dry cleaner, one that didn’t, unfortunately, take such good care with the buttons.
But one night, as she was staring into the bathtub, which had begun to crack around the drain, she had the realization that this was not what John would have chosen, if he could have chosen. If he felt he could have chosen. After all, what kind of life was he returning to? With Lila there had been abandonment. Sleeping with other people. The unhappiness that led to the separation in the first place. The yellow half-painted room. They still had to deal with all that. She’d been imagining them mostly in bed, or having breakfast together, smiling and happy. She imagined running into them at the movies, their arms comfortably around each other. But, in reality, maybe it wasn’t like that.
By the end of January she was able to walk past the café on her way home from swimming. Normally she would cross to the other side, the “safe” side. As she hurried by, she was torn between peeking into the big window and keeping her head ducked low, so he wouldn’t see her. She ended up keeping her eyes on the ground in front of her, but it was a start. When she got home, she went straight into the bathroom and sat on the lid of the toilet. She waited for the choking pressure in her chest to come and the tears to start, but nothing happened, so she went back out and started making dinner for Patsy and Annali.
The next time she passed the café, she forced herself to walk slowly, and then to glance inside. She returned to visiting Phan at the video store, and began using her favorite cleaners again. She risked seeing him. Them.
She was getting over it. She could feel it. Maybe she would never entirely be over him, but she thought she was beginning to see that a fairly normal future could be hers again.
She needed to see him, to make sure.
WHEN JOHN UNLOCKED THE DOORS EARLY ONE MORNING in late winter, she was standing there, waiting for him.
“Hi,” she said. He was surprised to see her, and jumped a little. But of course, it was still dark outside, so perhaps he’d mistaken her for a mugger.
Before he could say anything else, she said, “This is rehearsed, okay? Okay. So. Here goes.” Her heart was beating fast and she had to take a deep breath. “I’m really sorry for the way I acted. I was a jerk. It was just . . . a little overwhelming, everything happening all in the same day, and I guess I kind of shut down.” It was freezing out on the sidewalk, and her words came out in wisps of vapor from her mouth, like a steam engine. The Little Engine That Could! She tried to smile at him. “Can I come in?”
“Of course,” he said, pushing open the door.
She sat at the counter and he poured her coffee, the same as always. “I’ve missed you,” he said, putting the cup in front of her.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
“Pru, I’m so sorry . . .”
She stopped him with a hand and a wince. “Apology accepted. But, really, it’s over. I’m fine now. And I want us to be friends.”
“Why can’t I say I’m sorry?”
“I don’t know why not, but I just can’t stand to hear that. It has something to do with what remains of my pride.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He brought his bartender’s stool over to sit across from her. He put his hands awkwardly on the counter in front of him, then in his lap. “You did nothing wrong. Nothing. It was me. I forgot myself. I forgot what I was doing—”
“I think it’s right, what you’re doing now. With your marriage. Not easy, but right.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks,” he said, uncertainly. They were clumsy with each other. This wasn’t exactly how she’d rehearsed it. Maybe it would take some time, after all.
“So,” she said briskly. “I had this idea we could go back to being friends.”
He looked at her for a long time. Then he said, “Can we just do that?”
“Why not? It’s what
we were doing, you know . . . before. Gay men do it all the time,” she added.
He looked at her, amused. “They do?”
“Oh, yeah. They just sleep with any old body, no hard feelings.”
“That might be a little bit of a generalization, don’t you think? Anyway, I didn’t think of what happened between us as exactly ‘sleeping with any old body.’ Did you?”
She shook her head, lost for words.
Some customers came in and he went over to take their orders. She tried to breathe deeply. Just that one tiny shake of her head had cost her something, to admit that. She drank her coffee, glad that it was all over. She’d really gotten hurt, she knew that. But she’d ridden it out, had her cry, and it was over. All over, now.
“Friends, huh?” he said, coming over to refill her coffee.
“Friends.”
“So, how do we do that?”
“Just like we used to. We tell each other things. We talk about what’s happening in our lives.”
“Like what?”
“Well, what’s happening in your life? With . . . Lila?” She had to push his wife’s name out of her mouth, like a seed or a pit. She tried pretending she was just one of his buddies, asking. Buddies! Pals! Friends.
He winced a little. “It’s so weird talking about this with you. You sure you want to?”
She gave him a gesture that said: Bring it on!
“Okay. Well, we’re in counseling. Obviously. We’re living apart, for the time being. And we’re supposed to have dates. Like, real dates. You know, with each other. And, of course, stay monogamous.”
She wanted to give him another gesture that would say, Take it away again! But she forced herself to nod understandingly, and respond, “I can see that. Make it special again. Something you have to plan for, instead of something you do by rote.”
“I’m supposed to call her up and ask her out. Can you imagine? After sleeping with her every night for seven years . . .” Suddenly, his voice broke off and he swatted the counter with his towel. He said, rather irritably, “I’m not talking about this with you, anymore.”
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