Pug Hill (9 page)

As our taxi speeds through Central Park on the way over to the west side, that very thought is still very much in the forefront of my mind. I have the feeling it’s scouting around, looking for a good place to pitch a tent. I have a feeling it wants to stay for a while. I’m not sure I want it there. I turn to Evan.

“Maybe we could get out on Broadway and get a slice of pizza?” I say.

“Why do you want pizza?”

“Well, we’ve been drinking for sport all night.” I let the words hang there between us. The staying-home-versus-going-out war, in which we have for a few months now been engaged, had been the topic of a vigorous argument the week before, one in which I had made him so mad that he threw a microwave pizza (pre-microwaving) at me. I’d been so sure that was going to be the argument to end all arguments, the one to segue into the breakup, but somehow it never did. The fact that I am bringing up pizza again right now should in no way be seen as a coincidence.

“I didn’t have dinner,” I add on, “and I’m hungry.”

“You’d think five million M&M’s would have done the trick.” He exhales in this way, this aggressive way that ends in a little snort. It reminds me of Pamela. I think this is fitting, as this is all her fault.

The cab pulls up outside of Evan’s building. He has not, as it worked out, asked the cab to stop on Broadway. As we walk toward his building, I think of how tonight, how so many nights, I would so much prefer sleeping at my apartment, with the nicer pillows and all my stuff. I exhale myself, and Evan stops in his tracks and says, “
What
,
Hope?”
He says it meanly, as meanly as you can say, “
What
,
Hope?”
And then, just like that, I know what comes next.

“Evan.” I take another breath, let it out.

“No, Hope, listen,” he says.
He’s going to say it first, I
think, and I think also that maybe I prefer it this way, that maybe I always have.

“Hope,” he says again, and I feel like it’s been so many times already tonight that he’s said my name. I wonder if maybe he thinks someone else is here, too? “I just don’t think this is worth it,” he says it softly, not so meanly at all. A line from a song that I don’t know the name of pops into my head:
I was the one worth leaving.
I try not to listen to it.

“I-I don’t either,” I say, instead of anything else. I look away from the sidewalk that up until now I have been staring at so intently. I look up at Evan and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look sad.

The past six, almost seven, months with Evan flash before my eyes, much in the manner of one Stouffer’s microwave pizza. It occurs to me that I could possibly stop this, that maybe I could say something about trying to be better or trying to find compromise. It occurs to me that maybe we could go together, just about ten blocks up Columbus to the Patagonia store and buy some new fleece things and some microfiber, the kind of materials that would wick away the cold. I could wear my fleece and see the meaning behind long, purposeful walks in the cold, and things right away would be better between us.

But I don’t say anything at all to Evan, because right now I know I’m afraid of more than just public speaking, and I want to believe that it’s entirely possible that sometimes the only thing to fear is fear itself.

“Sorry,” he says. I wait, but he doesn’t say my name again. He looks at me. I tell myself it is nothing if not unwise to try to build a foundation with someone who will throw a pizza at you.

“I’m sorry, too,” I say, even though I harbor darkness in my heart, even though I’m pretty sure that I’m not. And then for a while neither of us says anything.

“I mean, uh, it’s late and all, and do you want to, like, talk about this more, do you want to come inside? I don’t want to be a dick or anything.”

No, I think,
of course not.

“It’s okay, I think I’m just gonna go,” I say and I feel like I’ve done this already, a million times before.

“Here, I’ll hail you a cab,” he says and starts walking over to Broadway. I walk with him and I think that it’s good, that all he’s saying right now to me is that he’ll hail me a cab. I think it’s so much better than other things he could say, things along the lines of, “Hope, don’t you have anything, anything at all, to say?” or, “Hope, I just want you to know I really did care about you,” or “Hope, I just want you to know I don’t really think your upper arms are fat.” Because any of those things, any combination of them or even any of them alone would, I am pretty sure, make me cry. And I don’t want to cry.

A taxi stops and we stand for a moment outside of it, and I worry it’s going to drive away without me. And then, I want it to.

“You know,” I say, “I think I’ll walk.”

“Are you sure? It’s late.”

“It’s not that late,” I tell him, and also, I’m telling myself, too. “It’s really not.”

Evan leans over to the cab driver’s window, waves and shakes his head no, and the cab drives away. He reaches out right then and touches my arm, just under my elbow and leaves his hand there for a moment. As our eyes meet, I want to be the type of person who will remember this. I want to be the type of person who remembers that there was softness, tenderness even, in the way he touched my arm and held it for a moment, right under the elbow. But I know I’m not.

I walk up a block and then cut over to Columbus. Columbus feels safer to walk on alone when it’s late, even though, as I mentioned already, it’s not that late.

I know what I don’t need right now. What I don’t need right now is to go to Pug Hill and be reminded that the pugs are not always there. But the thought, that if I went there, I would maybe see a pug, overrides any memory of how much worse I felt when there were no pugs at Pug Hill. And anyway, I’ve never been tremendously skilled at learning from my mistakes. Historically, I’ve been much more of a fan of trying them out for a second time.

Though I do aspire to be the type of person who learns from her mistakes, or at least from her previous breakups. If you get to thirty-one years old and find yourself single, as I now have, chances are that in order to get here, you’ve gotten yourself through quite a few breakups, quite a few breakups from which you can learn. Unless, of course, you’ve had one boyfriend or even a husband for the past, say, ten years and at thirty-one, this is the first breakup you are dealing with. If that is the case, I fear I cannot help you with the knowledge I’ve spent a while now accumulating.

Granted, as far as breakups go, I know that the Evan breakup is going to be slightly easier, because I really do believe that the leaving of this relationship is such a better thing than staying in it. But even so, there will be things I’ll have to hurdle over, concepts I’ll have to wrap my head around. The first, and I believe the most important, thing that I will need to understand is that things are going to be different. Clearly.

This morning, for example, when I first woke up, the first thing that popped into my head was no longer a muddled, fuzzy,
What is going on with me and Evan, and why are we even holding on to any of it, and why don’t we just break up?
The first thing rather was crisp, clear:
I am single. Here I am.
And that, I’m pretty sure, was as good a place as any to start. And then I thought about Pug Hill and how I’d like to go there before work, just really quickly, and see if maybe any pugs were there.

I get ready for work as quickly as I can. I don’t linger over the paper or spend a lot of time figuring out what to wear, because of Elliot and all. Today is not, out of respect mostly for the relationship that just ended, a day to think about Elliot. As I head out the door, I realize something: I have to get my coffee at Starbucks now.

Today is not the day to go to Columbus Bakery, the place where I usually go in the mornings to get coffee. Columbus Bakery, for years, was just Columbus Bakery, a place with excellent coffee—so excellent as to overshadow the stressful clientele and a mind-bogglingly disorganized and really rather senseless ordering system. But then the inevitable association happened. Maybe it was because he liked the coffee there as much as I do, or maybe it was because I’d clued in fairly early on that the suggestion of a trip to Columbus Bakery could sometimes keep us from the never-ending game of Arctic Explorer that Evan always seemed so determined to play. But somewhere along the way, Columbus Bakery went from being just a place to being an
Evan
place. And now, I can’t go there.

It isn’t the time to get nostalgic. Nostalgic, as everyone who has ever had a breakup knows, is just a stop or two away on the train from Maybe-It-Wasn‘t-All-That-Bad-ville. I tell myself that no matter how lonely I may feel in the days to come, when the IM’s don’t pop up on my computer screen, when there isn’t anyone there on weekend mornings (even if the person who was there on weekend mornings believed himself to be Nanuk of the North), I know I don’t want to go to Maybe-It-Wasn’t-All-That-Bad-ville. I’ve stopped by this town so many times in my past. It’s taken me a long time, longer perhaps than most, to figure out that they don’t tell you the truth there.

Starbucks, I am compelled to say, as I cue up behind five or six comparatively less-stressed-out-than-the-Columbus-Bakery types, feels remarkably (or at least comparatively) more serene. How sad really, if you think about it, for Columbus Bakery. To be so disorganized and stressful and chaotic that your very existence can make a Manhattan Starbucks seem peaceful, even serene? I imagine though that the Columbus Bakery people, clearly an oblivious lot if ever there was one, do not care about things like this.

Serenity though, just like solace, can be quite fragile. It’s a lesson I seem to be learning and learning again a lot lately. As I approach the counter, in the instant that I make eye contact with the Starbucks person, I get so confused I’m not sure what it is that I want. I just don’t know and, on top of that, I have forgotten what everything means.

Is it a
grande
that I want or a
venti
? And then, just like that, regardless of what I’ve been telling myself all morning, regardless of what I’ve been telling myself for all the months leading up to this morning, I
miss
Evan. Or maybe I just
think
that I miss him, but, really, I don’t know what the difference is. As my eyes start to sting, I think, maybe not for the first time, that I am insane. I tell myself that I don’t really miss Evan, that I’m just really bad at change. I forge ahead, I order a tall coffee, and a moment later, when it is handed over to me, it looks so small.

“Can I have a large coffee?” I say. “Please,” I add on hastily, because the Starbucks person, the
barrista
(I think
barrista
is what they’re supposed to be called) does not look pleased.

“You ordered a tall,” she tells me. She points this out in such a way that I do not feel she is inclined, on her own, to simply pour the small coffee into a larger cup and then add some more. Yes, of course the obvious here is that I suggest this to her, but there is, I fear, the looming possibility of a horrible, “that’s wasting a cup” scene, or something along those lines.

I stare for a moment at the small coffee in front of me. Starbucks is such a ubiquitous part of normal city life, and I’ve just completely missed it. It’s like working at a place where there are conference rooms and water coolers and clients, where coworkers go out at night for drinks together. It is everything that is normal and everyday about living and working in New York, and I, for the life of me right now, just don’t get it. I don’t want, after everything else, to be a Starbucks cliché. And this might already be obvious, but to tell you the truth, I have a small (tall?) problem with confrontation.

Instead of anything else, I look up and say, “Okay, then, could I please have another tall, too?” and I kid you not, the Starbucks person, the
barrista
, she rolls her eyes at me, just like Evan. I wonder if maybe it’s all so I don’t get too overwhelmed with things so suddenly being so different. I wonder if it’s all just so I feel a little bit like nothing has really changed. It occurs to me that lately I have been spending a lot of time wanting to believe that everything is a sign. It also occurs to me that, like it or not, I don’t think the world actually works that way.