by Carol Snow
“You should probably get going,” I said rudely. “If you’ve got a flight to catch. Or—” It hit me: of course he didn’t come all the way up to Boston just to see me. “Are you staying at Jennifer’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” The familiar stab: just when I thought it was gone forever. “So you’re still together?”
“Yeah.”
I tried to think of something nice to say about her. She’s nice? No. Funny? No. A good dresser? God, no. “She’s a good writer.” I gulped. I hated to admit such a thing.
“What?”
“Her writing. It’s good, I think.”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Haven’t you read it?”
“Just her fiction. And you know me and fiction—I’m not much of a judge.”
“But you can tell if it’s good, can’t you?”
He shook his head dismissively. “I don’t read much fiction except for mysteries. So what do I know?”
“What genre? I mean, I always thought Jennifer wrote literary fiction.”
He shook his head. “Science fiction romance.”
I paused. “You mean she writes science fiction and she writes romance? Or she writes romantic science fiction?”
“Romantic science fiction.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing. What does that mean? Alien dating?”
He started to smile. “I think the term is ‘intergalactic mating.’ Or sometimes ‘cross-species pollination.’”
“Oh my God.” I smiled in spite of myself. In spite of everything. “Cyberbabies?”
“No babies,” he said. “Fully grown pod people. They emerge from eggs following a twenty-year gestation. Makes life a lot easier for their parents.”
“But what a disaster for all those diaper manufacturers and Montessori schools.” We laughed, and I remembered how it felt. Once, we’d laughed together often. But that had been a long time ago, maybe years before he left. More soberly, I asked, “If Jennifer’s such a lousy writer, why do you stay with her?”
“I didn’t say she was lousy,” he said. “I said it wasn’t my thing. And, anyway, I don’t really care what she writes. I just care about who she is. She’s so . . . honest. She really doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks. I’ve never met anyone like that before. She’s just so totally her own person. And I think she’s good for me. She makes me look at life differently. Makes me think about what matters.”
I cut him off before he could start telling me how great she was in bed. “If you don’t care about her writing, why was mine such a big deal?”
He stared at me, confounded. “Because I thought it mattered to you. I just wanted something to matter to you. Something other than me.”
The doorbell rang. I jumped. I’d completely forgotten about Dennis. I opened the door and Dennis strode in. “There’s a faucets and fixtures show in Medford. You want to go?” He stopped dead when he saw Tim. “Hello?”
“Dennis, this is Tim. Tim, Dennis.”
“Ah,” Dennis said, the light dawning. “Tim.” The unspoken end of the sentence—“the unfeeling shit who broke your heart and ruined your career”—hung in the air.
Tim sprang up from the couch. “I’d better get going.” I nodded. At the door, he hugged me stiffly but for longer than I would have expected. My gut began to hurt. Just go. Just go. Just go.
Tim looked up at Dennis and back at me. “I’m glad you found somebody,” he whispered solemnly. I opened my mouth to set him straight, then shut it and nodded. Everybody deserves a little dignity now and then, even me.
When the door shut (softly; far too softly), Dennis took me in his arms before I’d begun to sob. But then I let loose. When I was done soaking his silk shirt, he strode into the bathroom and came back with a box of tissues. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose only to find it hopelessly stuffed. Dennis pushed my hair back from my face. “The guy from the college was much hotter.”
It was another Friday night, months later, when my phone rang.
“It’s Jeremy,” he said. My pulse quickened, and I hated myself for it. We exchanged stiff hellos. Then he said, rather flatly, “I got a job in Boston. Starting in July. I just thought you should know. Like, in case we run into each other or something. I just didn’t want you to be surprised.”
“Well, congratulations,” I said. Damn that pulse. “I’m working in the Back Bay now. Will you be anywhere near that?”
“Framingham.”
I paused, confused. “That’s, um, not really Boston. It’s about a half hour, forty minutes away.” Surely he knew that already. “The chances of us running into each other are pretty slim.”
“Right,” he said crisply. “But you never know. And like I said, I just didn’t want you to be surprised.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.” The silence was so painful, I wondered why neither of us made a move to end the conversation. Finally, I spoke. “Are you seeing anyone?” Who said that?
A pause. The quickened pulse had morphed into a pounding thud. “No. You?”
Shit. I could lie, I thought. But no: I’d lied to Jeremy enough for one lifetime. “Yes. But only on Saturdays. And alternate Tuesdays.” Max and I had dropped the occasional Thursdays, both claiming to be too busy, but mostly feeling too closed in.
“Oh,” he said. And he was disappointed, I could tell—or maybe I just wanted him to be.
“But today’s Friday,” I said quietly.
I could hear him breathing. Maybe his heart was thudding, too. “And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s Friday, too.”
Max was relieved to be cut loose. He did his best to act hurt, but then he confessed that he’d been carrying a torch for a secretary in his office ever since he’d joined the firm, but he hadn’t asked her out because she was a working-class girl from Revere with a killer accent and no college education. “Besides,” he said as kindly as he could, “I’ve always felt that there was a bit of a, um, generation gap between you and me.”
I smiled tightly and sent him on his way, wondering what I’d ever seen in this shallow twerp.
Jeremy graduated with distinction. I didn’t attend the ceremony, as we both agreed it would be too weird. Besides, his parents were having some trouble accepting our relationship. During our one tense dinner, his mother, after a couple of martinis, asked about the health of my ovaries, which I told her were, to the best of my knowledge, in tip-top shape. As much as I disliked his mother on other grounds, I understood her concern. I, too, thought Jeremy deserved better—or at least younger—than me.
“Are you sure you aren’t just staying with me to piss off your parents?” I asked, mock jokingly, one night. He was lying on my couch, his head on my lap, while I stroked his curls, which were set to be chopped off in a couple of days in preparation for his new job.
“I’ve already told them I’m not going to medical school,” he said. “That’s pissed them off enough already.”
Marcy and Dan had us over for dinner. I expected it to be uncomfortable, for my friends to set a place for Jeremy at the children’s table or to at least send me knowing smirks. Instead, Dan nodded to me in the kitchen, as I scraped plates into the sink. “You look happy,” he said.
“I am.”
“That’s all that matters.”
Jeremy rented an apartment in Framingham with three other guys from Mercer, but he spent most nights at my apartment and did a reverse commute out of the city. Each morning, he put on one of his three suits and a dress shirt he had ironed the night before. He looked handsome, of course, in spite of his cheap suits, but I liked him best when he came home and put on sweats and a T-shirt after neatly hanging his suit and shirt in my closet. He seemed lighter without that suit, more himself. His job was in ad sales for a radio station. “I never knew you were interested in radio,” I said when he first described the job to me.
“Neither did I,” he laughed.
After a few weeks of rude receptions to his co
ld calls and a paycheck that seemed so much smaller after the taxes had come out, he asked me if work ever got any better, and I told him sometimes, but not always. It was as honest as I could be. He talked about architecture school for about a week, then he moved on to ideas about social work, real estate or teaching. Dennis, who I still saw as much as possible, although he, too, was seeing someone, suggested that Jeremy find a sales position in the interior design industry. “Between the men and the women—honestly, no one would say no to you.” Jeremy laughed (and blushed), but said he secretly coveted a recliner with a drink holder and couldn’t really see getting excited about upholstery and “curtainy things.” I think he fell a bit in Dennis’s estimation after that, although Dennis continued to describe him as a “nice, nice boy.”
I tell him he should save his money, buy a backpack and spend a year in Europe. “You’ll never regret the things you did,” I tell him. “You’ll only regret the things you didn’t do.”
“Would you come with me?” he asks every time.
“No, but I’d wait for you,” I say. We leave it at that.
One Sunday, Jeremy looked up from circling every entry-level ad in the help wanted section and sighed. “I really envy those people who grow up knowing exactly what they want out of life,” he told me. “Like, they’re five years old, and they say they want to be a veterinarian when they grow up, and twenty-five years later, that’s exactly what they are.”
I put down my coffee and walked over to him. I held him tight and told him that knowing what you want takes the fun out of life, that true joy come from the surprise.