I was glad someone was excited. Because after I promised Rupi that I would be happy to review her proposal when it was ready, then watched her bounce down the hall toward her desk, a terrible thought kept echoing through my mind: I don’t really want to do this anymore.
FOUR
Paul had already been seated when I arrived at the restaurant. He slid out of the booth and stood when he saw me, then gave me the twice-over.
“You know I stopped dyeing it a few months ago,” I said, referring to my curls, which were threaded with silver. I didn’t really like it myself—it was less Steel Magnolias and more steel wool—but I didn’t want Paul to dislike it. Especially when I had zero motivation to make an appointment with my colorist.
“No, I actually love it,” he said, still eyeing me. “There’s just a lot more contrast than when I last saw you.”
Translation: I looked awful.
“You can pull off anything,” he added as he sat down again.
“You’re lying through your teeth, but I appreciate the intention behind it,” I said, sliding into the booth across from him. “Now if only I had your immunity to grays.” Boyishly lean with a full head of brown hair, my brother usually passed for a decade younger than he was. But as I examined him more closely, I realized the bags under his eyes were even darker than Shiloh’s, and his skin was just as sallow as mine had been in the mirror that morning. Forget wrinkles; apparently the true marker of middle age was looking like you were in immediate need of a blood transfusion.
He slid back into his side of the booth. “So your tests came back clear.” He said this as a statement rather than a question.
“What if they didn’t?” I said, but I was smiling.
“I would have picked up on your distress—but I also know you would have called me immediately,” he said, arching an eyebrow. When I’d first been diagnosed with cancer, I’d hid it, telling myself I was protecting him and our father. No surprise, that ended up causing more pain than it spared either of them.
“Learned that lesson the hard way.” I hesitated, then said, “I did call Dad by accident.”
“I’m sorry, Libs,” he said, frowning. “Did you end up listening to his voicemail?”
I shook my head. “No, I hung up before then, thank goodness.”
“Thank goodness for what? I call his number all the time just to hear his voice. I suppose at some point I’ll have to stop paying his cell phone bill, but for now, that’s a hundred dollars a month well spent.”
“That’s nice of you,” I said, not adding that it was also a bit morbid, if not downright depressing. “Now that you know my news, how are you?”
He held up a finger to me, then motioned for the waiter. After he’d ordered a glass of wine for himself and club soda with lime for me, he looked at me intently and said, “So when are we burying Dad?”
I blinked—and here I thought we were going to have a pleasant conversation. “Soon.”
“Define soon. Next month?” said Paul, pulling up a calendar on his phone.
Our father had died five months earlier. Long after Paul and I reached adulthood, our father had admitted that seeing our mother in a coffin had been one of the most traumatic experiences he’d lived through. “She looked like a complete stranger, a melted wax version of herself,” he’d told us. Which is why he’d asked to be cremated and have his ashes beside her in the cemetery just outside of Detroit where the rest of her family had been buried. We’d followed his wishes on the first part and had held a small memorial dinner with Paul’s and my family and Aunt Patty, my father’s sister, and her husband a week after he died. But we had yet to make it out to Michigan; his ashes were still sitting in an urn over my non-functioning fireplace.
“Next month is nuts for me,” I said. “Half the office is on vacation.”
“Most of North America is away in August, including all the wealthy people who would otherwise be inclined to write you checks,” he said. Of course Paul would know this—his net worth was that of a small developing nation, and he’d made many insanely generous donations to the foundation over the years.
“Maybe September? The weather will be cooler.”
He leaned forward. “I recall you saying, ‘Maybe April’ and ‘Maybe June.’ Should I plan on doing this myself?”
“Don’t be like that. Work has been really busy.”
“Libs,” he said sternly. “You can’t pull the workaholic card on someone who wrote the book on living in the office. It’s a ten-hour drive to Michigan. We could get it done in a single weekend.”
Could and should were two different things. Our father had died in February, right after the twins’ twelfth birthday, and I’d spent the rest of that month, and all of the following, bursting into tears in inappropriate places. I knew that the minute I saw my father’s headstone next to my mother’s, I’d revert to sobbing violently every time I saw a nice old man at, say, the bodega down the street. Thanks, but no.
Our server had returned. “We’re not ready to order just yet,” said Paul as she placed our drinks in front of us.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m ready.”
He sighed deeply. “Go ahead.”
“Caesar salad with chicken,” I told the server.
“Same, but no croutons or dressing,” said Paul.
“Hold the joy,” I remarked.
“Nothing tastes better than being thin. So! Weekend in Detroit!”
“Shiloh often works Saturdays or Sundays. You know that.” Paul was still looking at me like he was expecting me to say something else, so I added, “I’ll talk to him about it and get back to you, okay?”
Now both of his eyebrows shot up, and he was staring at me so intensely that I had to look away. “Libs, I say this as someone who adores you and loves you more than anyone else in the world: Have you been screened for depression?”
I turned back to him so quickly it’s a wonder I didn’t give myself whiplash. “That’s not something to joke about.”
“You know full well that I wouldn’t joke about that.” Paul had struggled with depression and anxiety most of his life. “I’m being dead serious.”
“Har.”
“Again—not joking.”
“Neither am I,” I told him. “I know the signs: I’m not hopeless, I don’t spend twelve hours a day in bed, I don’t want to hurt myself or anyone else, and I haven’t lost interest in sex.” It was a shame I couldn’t say the same of my husband.
Paul held up a hand. “While I’m glad you know what to watch for, I didn’t need to know that last one.”
“You asked.”
“I suppose I did.” His face was pained as he glanced across the restaurant. “Speaking of depressing things, I do have news.”
My stomach sank. As kids, Paul and I had our own language; I guess we still kind of did, because I’d secretly known he was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear from the moment I’d spotted him at the booth where we were now seated. But after being wrong about my cancer returning, I’d been hoping this was one more thing I’d gotten messed up in my head.
“Is it the boys?” I said.
“No, they’re great.”
“Work?”
He shook his head, then leaned across the table and said quietly, “Charlie and I are divorcing.”
I stared at him blankly. So much for that shared lexicon—he may as well have just spoken to me in Urdu. “I . . . um . . . what?!”
“We’ve been mulling it over for months, but we finally came to an agreement yesterday.”
I felt like he’d just socked me in the gut. “But you and Charlie are the happiest couple I know!”
“No,” said Paul slowly, the way I sometimes did when the twins were being dense, “we’re your closest couple friends.”
“Siblings can’t be friends,” I said, as if this had anything to do with anything. Regardless, he was right. Though Shiloh and I had a small but tight social circle, we spent the most time with Charlie and
Paul; the four of us, I’d always thought, balanced each other. They’d been a major deciding factor in our moving out of a charming house with three large bedrooms in suburban New Jersey and into the city. They couldn’t just ruin that.
“My point is, you think we’re happy because you want us to be,” said Paul.
I winced.
“We’ve been growing apart for years now,” he added.
“So grow back together! Go to couples counseling! Don’t . . .” I was getting choked up. Bad enough that our father had died. Now Paul was telling me he was purposefully widening the crack in our family’s foundation? “Just don’t divorce after more than a decade of marriage,” I whispered. “I’ve already done that, and let me tell you, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
He patted my hand. Why was he so calm, when I was having to work hard not to cry into my club soda? “I know, and I’m sorry, Libs. I knew you’d take this hard, which is why I didn’t tell you about it until we were sure.”
I sniffed. “Me taking it hard? What about you? And Toby and Max?”
“We’ve actually been going to therapy as a family. They knew it was a possibility, and I think they’re as okay with it as they can be.”
“You’re saying you told your teenaged sons, but you didn’t tell me,” I said, dabbing at my eyes with my cloth napkin.
“Should I have asked you to join us in therapy?”
Yes. “No.”
He sighed deeply and didn’t speak for a while. When he opened his mouth again, I wished he hadn’t. “I had an affair.”
“You did what?” I said, so loudly that the couple seated at the next booth immediately turned to stare.
“It was an emotional affair,” said Paul in a low voice. “I didn’t touch him. It was just a friendship that accidentally turned romantic.”
“Oh, that’s a relief!” I said sarcastically, though it was, a little bit. If spit and communicable diseases had not yet been swapped, maybe there was still hope for Paul and Charlie to save their marriage. “What were you thinking?”
His brown eyes were flashing with anger, and something else I couldn’t readily identify. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Fine. It was right after Dad died, and I felt . . . well, dead inside. Charlie was in the middle of filming and he wasn’t around a lot. When he was, he was tired, and mostly I felt like he didn’t get it. He’s never lost a parent. So I started going to a grief support group.”
I startled. “You did?”
Paul took a sip of his wine, then said, “There’s a reason I asked you if you were depressed. I was, and meds weren’t cutting it. My therapist suggested the group, and I decided to give it a try.”
“Which is where you met—what’s this guy’s name, anyway?”
“Andy,” he said, wrinkling his nose like it was a bad word. “His wife had just died and, well, I guess the whole wife thing made me think it wasn’t a big deal when we grabbed a drink after the group was over.”
“Paul Ross! Didn’t Tom coming out teach you anything?”
“I know!” he said, throwing his hands in the air. “But it was just so nice to talk to someone who listened and understood. Then one night, Andy and I ordered a second round of drinks and he told me I had nice eyes. Before I knew it, we were texting several times a day.”
We sat in silence, and not the comfortable kind. I wasn’t sure if I was more upset that I was just hearing this now, after the decision had already been made, or that he wasn’t trying harder to save his marriage. “Oh Paul,” I finally said. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. Obviously, it’s over with Andy—I cut it off once I realized that I was in too deep.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “But I don’t really understand how you got to that point in the first place. You and Charlie love each other!”
“We do,” he said morosely. “But our chemistry just isn’t there anymore, though.”
My face grew warm as I thought of the previous night. “How can it be if you’re paying attention to other men?”
“Touché. Still. Chemistry isn’t something you can fix with willpower or wishing—which, by the way, I know you’re going to suggest. I know things look fine from the outside, but that’s because we thought we could fake it until we made it. The truth is, we’ve been unraveling for a very long time.”
Maybe I would have suggested willpower, even if I would have phrased it differently. But mostly I was too shocked to form an articulate sentence. Shiloh and I had dinner at their place not two weeks earlier, with all four of our kids there, and they’d seemed like any other long-married couple. Were they playing footsie under the table or meeting in the middle of a strand of spaghetti? No—but they weren’t hollering at each other, either. Faking it or not, as Paul’s twin, I should have been able to sense this so-called unraveling.
“Holy Shih Tzu,” I muttered. “This makes zero sense to me. If you still love each other, why don’t you find a way to make it work? Isn’t love about compromise?”
He pursed his lips and looked across the restaurant for a moment before responding. “Our compromise is to divorce amicably. We’re even going to both stay in our place until next year when the boys are in college. Honestly, Libs, I’ve been thinking about this since Dad died. Life is so stupidly short.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re having a midlife crisis?”
He shrugged. “Did you know that a recent study revealed that existential dissatisfaction peaks at forty-seven?”
We would be forty-seven in two months. “Is that factoid intended to spark joy? Because it sounds more like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me,” I said, even as I considered my flatlined emotional state at Dr. Malone’s office. Was my ennui age related? Maybe that was also what was going on with Shiloh. How long until we, too, decided that the only way to deal with our existential dissatisfaction was to ditch our hard-earned union? But no, that was ridiculous. Emotional states were contagious—I’d seen the studies myself. And I was in the middle of catching a case of the Pauls.
“Personally, I think it’s great to know, because we can prepare for it,” said Paul.
“I don’t need to prepare for anything. My life is already good, and I intend for it to stay that way.”
He lifted his glass to me. “Please don’t stop snorting fairy dust on my account.”
I knew he was trying to get me to laugh, but I couldn’t. All I could think about was how absolutely heart-wrenching it had been to separate from Tom, even though our marriage truly wasn’t salvageable.
He took another sip of his wine, then said, “I, for one, am not leaving my future in the hands of fate. I’m going to take action even though it’s going to be hard, because I want to be happier than I am while I still have the chance.”
“Define happiness, please. Because from where I stand, your life checks all the boxes. I fail to see how you’re going to be ‘happier,’” I said, putting the word in air quotes, “by leaving your partner of nearly twenty years.”
He eyed me. “You should want the same thing for yourself. Happiness, I mean.”
“I want what I already have,” I said evenly. “That’s the definition of happiness.” Then I reached across the table and helped myself to his wine. It was as dry as a camel’s back and made me cough a little, but I took another swig after I’d swallowed the first.
Paul, who hadn’t even blinked at my pirating his booze, said, “Libby, it’s not just that Charlie and I aren’t on the same page. It’s like we’re not even reading from the same book anymore. Listen, if anyone’s immune to divorce, it’s you and Shiloh. But don’t make the same mistake we made, okay?”
I was almost afraid to hear what he was going to say next, though I wasn’t sure why. “And what’s that?”
He turned toward the window at the front of the restaurant. On the other side of the glass, a couple was making out. And by making out, I mean they were really going at it—right in front of the rest
aurant in broad daylight. And they weren’t even young!
Paul turned back to me. “We coasted,” he said quietly. “And it turns out that coasting is just quitting in slow motion.”
FIVE
I’ve heard divorce described as a slow death. Mine was more like a spontaneous amputation. When I’d tried to tell Tom that I’d just been diagnosed with cancer, he’d mistaken my sobbing for a sign I’d figured out what he’d been working up the courage to tell me for months: he wasn’t actually attracted to women, including but not limited to me. As such, we went from being what I’d thought of as deliriously happy to a complete farce in the span of mere minutes. So when Paul referred to the “unraveling” of his relationship with Charlie, I didn’t really know how that worked. If a marriage unspooled itself over time, didn’t that mean there were ample opportunities to rein it back in? I had a strong suspicion that it wasn’t something that had just happened to them. It was a decision that Paul had made—again and again and again.
Now he needed to decide to reverse it while he had the chance.
I was still stewing when Shiloh got home from work that night. The girls were eating dinner at their friend Cecelia’s, so I’d made a quick salad, knowing that Shiloh would grab something from his work cafeteria.
“Hey, you,” he said, kissing me. “How was your day?”
“Interesting,” I said, following him into our bedroom.
“Interesting good, or interesting bad?”
“Maybe a mix?” I admitted, watching him unbutton his shirt. I didn’t really want to tell him about my conversation with Paul. Saying it aloud would make it . . . real, I supposed. And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that it was only a matter of time before my brother saw the error of his ways.
“Rupi proposed a new project,” I said, my eyes still on him. Now he was in his boxers, looking far fitter than a fifty-five-year-old man had any right to. “She wants us to do a camp for kids who’ve lost a parent to cancer.”
Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around Page 3